


all's well that ends well to end up with you

by coruscatingcatastrophe



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Developing Relationship, Didn't Know They Were Dating, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Lance (Voltron) is a Good Friend, M/M, Pining Keith (Voltron), Sharing Clothes, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Touch-Starved Keith (Voltron), Weird Galra Mystery Illness, sharing everything honestly, theyre both idiots but it all works out in the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:47:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24031519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coruscatingcatastrophe/pseuds/coruscatingcatastrophe
Summary: Keith's jacket gets ruined, so Lance decides to be a good Samaritan and give him his. This is the beginning of the end.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 54
Kudos: 804
Collections: Soft _sensational _klance





	all's well that ends well to end up with you

**Author's Note:**

> this work has been sitting unfinished in my docs for moNths and i finally got around to finishing it today just so i could say i did. it's one of the first fics i started for the voltron fandom, and honestly, it's pretty dumb. my entire premise was: "Lance gives Keith his jacket because he's cold all the time" and it turned into this disaster. but i hope you can get some enjoyment out of it anyway lol 
> 
> title is taken from taylor swift's "lover"

It starts in the way all unassuming, well-intended disasters do. 

They’re invited by the residents of planet Bli-q to attend their annual harvest festival. According to Coran, this is a big deal, since this holiday is deeply rooted in the Bli-quans’ traditions and religious lore and whatnot. The way the Altean man describes it, the holiday sounds like a strange admixture of Thanksgiving, Halloween, and a Renaissance festival (everyone is grateful for everything, costumes are optional and many are dressed in a style not entirely dissimilar to the Earthen medieval one, and for some inexplicable reason there are jack-o-lanterns  _ everywhere _ ), and from the moment they arrive, Keith thinks he could easily like this place. 

Bli-q is an autumn dreamscape. Keith never really had the chance to experience fall weather on Earth, since he spent pretty much his entire life in a desert, but he imagines that the scenery of this planet looks a lot like an autumn in Maine or . . . Vermont, or whatever fall-experiencing state might.  _ Wherever _ on Earth gets to experience this sort of weather. It’s nice, he thinks. It’s pretty. 

Deciduous trees stretch along the line of the stripped landscape before them. Dead grass and orange hay crunch underfoot, with the occasional red and yellow leaves swept away from the tree line and then abandoned on the unrelenting ground. Keith steps on one every now and then as they explore the different booths that are set up, ignoring the inexplicable thrill of satisfaction he gets every time. 

(Lance and Pidge are not ignoring the thrill of satisfaction that comes from leaf-crunching. At present, they’re jumping into piles of the colorful leaves like they’re five years old, squealing and shrieking and just causing general havoc for everyone around them. The  _ actual  _ children of the planet stare on with stars in their eyes.) 

All in all, Keith thinks it’s shaping up to be a pretty great day. He has a giant turkey leg in his hand and is watching with interest as a pair of Bli-quans face off on a makeshift stage, tossing swords back and forth in some complicated dance that Keith can barely follow with his eyes. Beside him, Shiro is trying and failing to pretend he isn’t falling asleep on a haystack. Above them, the sky is piercing blue and crystal clear. 

Which is why he—and everyone else—is so caught off guard when it starts raining down  _ literal acid on everything _ . 

The Bli-quans seem to be at large unaffected by this. Some vendors look to the sky with some annoyance, bringing out pop-up canopies to prop over the wares they’re trying to sell, but the general populace seems to be perfectly at ease. Some of the little kids that Lance and Pidge were previously entertaining get distracted by the acidic rainfall instead, beginning to run back and forth across the field with their arms outspread and laughter on their tongues. 

At first, Keith thinks nothing of it. It’s been a while since he’s seen rain, so he supposes it’s nice. Fitting for this autumnal planet. He doesn’t take note of the way the raindrops sizzle against the fabric of his jacket until Shiro starts screaming.

“ _ OW,  _ oh God what is this, why is my face  _ burning, Keith why _ —” 

The rain is acid. Coran had failed to see a point in mentioning this to anyone, because  _ “Silly me, I forgot to check the planet’s weather forecast! Also, I forgot how delicate human skin is. Sorry, won’t happen again!”  _ Needless to say, at the end of the day there are a bunch of pissed-off paladins on the bridge, Shiro at the forefront of them all and pressing a bag of frozen goo to his face. They’re lucky they were able to find shelter before any of his skin actually burned off. 

Shiro’s face, unfortunately, isn’t the only thing that the acid rain tampered with. Pidge is sporting burn cream on her bare arms and legs, and one of Lance’s sneakers was ruined when he accidentally stepped in a puddle while fleeing from the malevolent shower. Some of Hunk’s hair is singed. 

Keith stares at the jacket in his hands and feels a kind of despair he hasn’t felt in a long time. The red leather is unsalvageable. Logically, he knows he’s lucky that it saved him from any real injuries, but—

But this jacket has survived through  _ so many things _ . It seems like a cruel joke that it’s only now, after years of seeing Keith through some of the most painful times of his life, that it succumbs to death by a sporadic, acidic rainstorm. The worst part is that it could have been avoided, if Coran hadn’t assured them that there was no need for their armor today.

_ A day of rest and relaxation!  _ he had said.  _ Turkey legs, rulareen pie, and jousting spectacles! You all deserve a day of peace and fun—so go, enjoy yourselves like the spry young paladins you are! _

And for once, Keith had listened. He had abandoned his chestplate and vambraces for his reliable black jeans and his favorite (and only) jacket, and he had let himself be  _ comfortable  _ and he was even having a good time, and—

And now his jacket is  _ ruined _ , and he doesn’t know how to quell the swell of disappointment knotting up his throat. He looks at Coran and he can’t help feeling a prick of misplaced resentment as his brain tries in vain to find a logical thing to pin this on. But it’s not Coran’s fault, not really—he does so much for them, he hadn’t meant for any of them to get hurt, and really if any of them have the right to be mad it’s Shiro and Pidge, who are the ones the rain damaged the most, but even they are already softening under the Altean man’s guilt-ridden apologies—and Keith doesn’t want to say something that he doesn’t mean, something that he’ll regret later. So he quietly excuses himself, and he locks himself in his room and holds the swaths of scorched fabric on his lap and tries to ignore the pressing feeling that he has lost everything.

(If he clutches the tattered jacket to his chest that night when he’s trying to sleep, as he’s trying to blink away the hot, unwelcome tears clogging up his throat—well, no one but him has to know.) 

In the following days, not much happens. Team training goes on as usual, unless there’s an actual battle to fight, or a planet to visit for some reason or another. Lance makes a passing comment about Keith’s missing jacket that he ignores, and he tries to get used to the feeling of walking the halls without it’s familiar weight and warmth draped over his shoulders. 

The problem is, it’s impossible to get used to the temperature of the castle without it. The castle has always been set to a freezing temperature for Keith—like, he’s from the  _ desert _ , literally anything below seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit is a winter wasteland to him—but his jacket had always made things bearable. Now, Keith has to fight the urge to rub his bare arms for warmth at dinner, and he’s unable to keep himself from shivering on movie nights, or when he’s wandering the castle halls when he can’t sleep, or when he’s on the bridge with the others as they go over mission briefings.

He’s so  _ cold _ . The only times when he’s not cold are the times when he’s training; he would consider just training all the time, except Shiro’s changed all the settings so that after a certain amount of time the bots shut down unless an override code is put in, and Keith unfortunately has not been able to crack the new one yet. So, that’s out. 

He finds himself on the observation deck one night when he can’t sleep, legs curled into himself with his arms around him like that will keep him warm somehow. (It doesn’t.) He sighs miserably, wondering if maybe he should just give up and go back to his bed, where at least the thin blankets offer  _ some  _ warmth, when he feels a presence settle down next to him on the floor. 

“Hey, man,” he hears softly. He doesn’t have to look to know that it’s Lance. Something his chest trills at the other boy’s presence, but Keith’s been experiencing that long enough to know how to ignore it. 

“. . . hey,” he says back, just as quietly, after a moment’s hesitation. He keeps his eyes on the expanses of space undulating before them, not thinking about how Lance is so close that their shoulders are almost brushing. 

“Couldn’t sleep?” Lance murmurs sympathetically, and Keith grumbles some sort of confirmation. He shuts his eyes after a moment, unable to stop a sigh from shuddering out of him as he rests his chin on his knees. He’s so cold that it’s stupid. All he wants is his jacket, but his jacket is sitting in a sad, unwearable pile at the bottom of his closet. 

“So, hey,” Lance speaks again into the quiet after some time has passed, sounding more hesitant than Keith thinks he’s heard him . . . well. Maybe ever. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Feel free to punch me in the face if you think I’m overstepping or something—though I make no promises to  _ not  _ try to defend myself if you try to kill me.” 

Keith peers at him out of the corner of his eye. He’s fidgeting with the sleeve of his robe, staring out of the observation glass in a way that Keith can only describe as wary. His own wariness wars with curiosity, and after only a moment the curiosity wins. “Go for it.” 

“So you . . . recently you’ve been, I dunno man. Really off? Not like, in training or anything, you’re great in that, as always which— _ kinda _ annoying, but whatever, I’ve made my peace with it. You’re good. Except you just—you seem . . . really sad?” Lance pauses in his rambling to take a breath, and Keith hears the way it hitches over his nerves on the way out before he’s speaking again. “I’m not the only one who’s noticed, the others have too, and we’re all just kind of worried about you because we’re here for you, you know? If you’re having a hard time. If you need to talk about it—whatever  _ it  _ might be—or, or just need someone . . . Just. I’m here. For you. So are . . . are you okay?” 

Keith feels his own breath get caught somewhere between his mouth and his lungs. He thinks that it wouldn’t be fair for anyone to point out just  _ how _ taken aback he is by Lance’s question, given that Lance went about it in  _ the most  _ roundabout way to ask him a simple three-worded question. 

He’s seemed sad recently? He didn’t even know any of them could read him that well.

“Oh,” he says quietly, the words barely a whisper of air between his teeth. He digs his nails into the fabric of his jeans, looks away from Lance’s face as he admits, “You’d think it’s stupid.”

“I wouldn’t,” the blue paladin says, voice surprisingly firm. “If it’s something that’s bothering you, it’s not stupid. You can tell me—I promise not to judge.” 

Keith thinks about that for a moment. He thinks about how much he’s come to depend on Lance in battle since they’ve become teammates, and how much he values him—both as a teammate and a friend. He thinks about Lance jumping into piles of leaves and making small alien children laugh. He thinks about how Lance must’ve also been rambling the castle on one of his sleepless nights, and instead of moving on upon seeing Keith here, came and sat down with him. He hears Lance say  _ are you okay?  _ and is surprised by how much he just wants to be honest with him.  _ No, no I’m not okay, yes I’m sad, no I don’t know how to deal with it _ . 

On his next exhale, Keith opens his eyes. He looks over at Lance to find the other boy already watching him, eyes wide and shining blue with sincerity. He thinks very carefully about his next words. 

“You . . . you know how you were always complaining about how my jacket looked like some fashion nightmare out of the eighties, or whatever?” 

He watches Lance’s eyebrows crease in confusion; clearly, this is not how he was expecting this conversation to go. “Yeah . . .?” 

“That’s because—it is. From the eighties, I mean. It was my dad’s when he was a teenager. He had a motorcycle, and he told me it was good for driving, and he thought it made him look cool and edgy. On him, it kind of was cool, but that’s just because my dad made everything look cool. Anyway, I was  _ obsessed _ with the thing when I was a kid.” 

Lance goes oddly still next to him, expression melting out of confusion into something smooth. Something slippery and unplaceable. He nods, just to indicate that he’s listening, so with a deep breath Keith goes on. “He always told me, if when I was big enough to wear it I still thought it was cool, he’d let me have it. But I was seven when he died, and I definitely wasn’t big enough for it yet so I . . . just carried it with me for years and years. It’s kind of a miracle that I was able to hold onto it through so many foster homes—I eventually lost everything else. I mean, except for my knife, you know. But still the jacket . . . the jacket was  _ everything _ . It was the only piece of my dad that I had left.

“So it just. It  _ hurts _ that it’s gone now. I know I should just get over it, because it was just a stupid  _ jacket  _ in the end _ ,  _ but just—just . . . no matter how many years pass, I can’t stop  _ missing  _ him. I miss him so much, and now it’s just like . . . he’s gone. He’s really gone now. I don’t have anything from him now.” 

He takes a moment to just let the shudders ride through his body. He swipes angrily at the rebel tears that have managed to escape from their carefully fortified reserves. And then he spits, “And to make matters worse, I’m just  _ cold _ .  _ All the time _ . My bones literally hurt because of how much I shiver on this stupid freezer spaceship. I can never stay warm. So, yeah, there’s that.” 

He tries to shrug off how big of a deal that is, but he can tell by the way Lance looks at him that he’s seeing right through him. There’s real pain in his friend’s eyes, real empathy for what Keith has just confessed to him. But there’s no pity, and Keith appreciates that a lot. 

“I feel like such an asshole now. I mean, I won’t take back the fact that that jacket was  _ truly  _ a fashion abomination,” Lance begins, which prompts a good-natured eye-roll out of Keith, “—but I shouldn’t have teased you so much for it. God, Keith, I’m  _ so  _ sorry. I . . . I didn’t know about your dad.” 

“I know you didn’t. I’ve never told you about him before,” Keith says, and then catches sight of the exasperation on Lance’s face and tacks on, “but I forgive you anyway,” because he knows that’s what the blue paladin wants to hear. 

Appeased, Lance sits back and nods his head, his eyes going distant for a moment as he seems to mull something over in his head. Eventually he says, “You know, I can maybe help you with the whole ‘feeling cold’ thing. If you want.” 

Keith feels his own eyebrows scrunch together in a mirror of Lance’s earlier expression. “Oh yeah? How?” 

Instead of responding verbally, Lance scoots just far enough into his space that his bent knee is pressing into Keith’s leg, and then he slowly, painstakingly wraps his arm around Keith’s shoulders. He feels the warmth emanating from Lance’s body begin to trickle slowly into his own, and he lets out a barely audible sigh as he sinks into it. 

“This okay?” Lance asks for confirmation, and Keith just gives a mindless hum in answer. They stay like that for a long time, bodies pressed close in a warmth Keith feels like he hasn’t had in  _ so long,  _ and it is so nice. Later, Lance walks with him back to their rooms, and he has him wait outside in the hall while he goes into his room for something. He returns within moments, presses something soft into Keith’s chest that he has to look down to see. 

He’s surprised to find that it’s Lance’s jacket, the fabric soft and worn from years of wear, though still in notably good condition. He looks back up at the blue paladin to find him smiling at him, somewhat sheepish. He rubs the back of his neck. 

“I uh, obviously it’s not your dad’s. But it’ll keep you warm? It’s the warm thing I was talking about earlier, the thing I said I could help with—yeah.” He shrugs. “I want you to have it.” 

“Wait, you mean the . . . the thing on the observation deck wasn’t what you meant?” Keith is somewhat confounded, even as he clutches Lance’s jacket in his hands and thinks  _ I can’t accept this _ . 

“Oh, that?” Lance’s eyes begin to sparkle then, in a familiar kind of mischief that Keith knows too well, though it’s usually confined to the perimeters of their pretend rivalry. “ _ That _ was just because I wanted to. But obviously, I can’t keep my arm around you  _ all  _ the time, so if you want, think of my jacket as my way of doing that. Just one never-ending, warmth-giving Lance hug. At your disposal whenever you want it.” 

“Oh . . .” And how exactly is Keith supposed to respond to  _ that _ ? He feels his cheeks burning red as something strange happens to his heart. He doesn’t want to say it skips a beat, because that’s not accurate; it just . . . slows down, kind of? For just a moment, before it picks up its regular pace again. Maybe a bit faster than normal, because this is uncharted territory with Lance. 

He knows he should give the jacket back. He should give it back, like, right this second. But Lance’s eyes gleam as if he knows what he’s thinking, as if he himself is thinking,  _ I dare you to try it, Kogane.  _ And he knows Lance wouldn’t take it back even if Keith’s instincts  _ weren’t  _ screaming at him to just take the jacket and run.

“Thank you,” he settles on, grudgingly. The beam Lance sends him makes him feel as if he’s lost and won something, all at once, though he can’t even begin to decode what those feelings mean. And then Lance is telling him goodnight, and he’s stepping into his room and letting the door shut between them, and Keith is standing alone in the hall. 

Obeying some strange, foreign instinct, Keith lifts Lance’s jacket to his nose and breathes in the scent clinging to the fabric for a long moment. It smells like vanilla and cinnamon, somehow, with a hint of Altean laundry detergent underneath it. He wonders how Lance gets it to smell so sweet. He thinks he’d like to live in this scent forever, because it is heavenly. 

Once he slips the jacket on, he has no choice but to admit it to himself: Lance will have to pry this jacket from his cold, dead hands. The sleeves are slightly too long, ending right against the tips of his fingers, and the shoulders are much looser than what he is used to. But it smells like Lance, and is warm like Lance, and for some reason those simple facts make something new and unbidden curl up warm in his chest, like a cat wrapping around his heart and making its home there. 

Keith doesn’t bother dwelling on those feelings for very long. Soon after putting on the jacket, Keith finds his way into his own bedroom and goes to bed. When he falls into sleep that night, he is warm. 

  
  


_____

  
  


Keith doesn’t notice it at first right away, but immediately following Lance giving him his jacket, their dynamic begins to . . .  _ shift _ . 

The next morning, Keith walks into breakfast wearing Lance’s jacket. He can feel everyone’s interested, probing eyes on him as he settles into his seat beside Pidge, but everyone wisely chooses to keep their thoughts to themselves. Lance catches his eye across the table and smiles at him, and again Keith feels his heart slow to a dull, heavy thud—as if it’s been dipped in molasses. 

It’s a strange sensation; it’s there in one blink and gone in the next. Keith forgets all about it. 

But then things start to get strange. 

Keith’s skin begins to itch one day, with no discernible cause. He doesn’t have a visible rash anywhere on his body. He asks Coran for antihistamines anyway. They don’t do anything for him except make his mouth feel drier than the desert he spent a year in. As the days pass, the itch becomes more intense. After a while, he begins to notice that it worsens whenever he’s in close proximity to Lance, and it is the very worst whenever Lance’s eyes are on him. 

He doesn’t know what to make of that. He says nothing and tries to get on with his day without making it noticeable that he’s scratching at the bare skin of his wrists and neck whenever possible. 

But that’s not the only thing that begins to change in relation to Lance. If anything, this itch seems to be  _ driving  _ Keith closer to him. If Keith doesn’t watch himself, he finds his body unconsciously moving towards the blue paladin whenever they’re in the same room. And then, later, when they’re  _ not  _ even in the same room. Keith will just be wandering the halls and suddenly he’s in front of Lance’s door. Or he’s stumbling upon him in the kitchen. Or walking in on him on the training deck by himself, running a simulation and shooting down all of the droids firing back at him. Running at him. Swinging their blades at him—

Lance doesn’t go down without a fight, but he does go down hard. Keith can hear the harsh sound his knee makes when it bangs down onto the floor all the way from where he stands in the doorway at the opposite end of the room. 

“Ah, quiznack,” the blue paladin swears softly under his breath as he rubs at his tender joint, wincing to himself. He doesn’t notice Keith or the lone droid approaching—the only one left from the simulation, which Lance must have forgotten about when he took down that last one. Keith activates his blade and stabs it through the bot’s chest in one smooth motion. The automated voice from the simulator announces: “ _ Level six complete,”  _ over the speakers, and Keith raises his eyebrows as Lance looks up at him, surprise flooding his face. 

“Keith? Oh, uhhh,  _ hey there _ . Quick favor—just tell me you  _ didn’t _ just save my ass from being crushed by some dumb robot I forgot about in my moment of soul-crushing agony?” 

“I could tell you that,” Keith says agreeably, watching with some amusement as his friend’s face begins to flood with skeptical relief, “—but I’d be lying.” 

Lance moans, sprawling dramatically on the floor with careful movements in regard to his right leg. “That’s so  _ unfair _ . I was being  _ so  _ cool before you got here, Keith! You should’ve seen it, I was shooting ‘em down so fast—” 

“I saw,” Keith interrupts, then flushes red when Lance’s mouth falls open in sudden, surprised bafflement. “I mean, I came to train, but you were already out here, and I didn’t want to interrupt you,” he lies as fluidly as he can manage, hoping that Lance can’t hear the way he stammers over his words. But what is he supposed to tell him?  _ I was watching you because I had this overwhelming itch to be near you and it led me here without even having to think about where I was going.  _ Yeah, like  _ that  _ would go over well. Lance would make fun of him and call him insane, probably. Honestly, Keith kind of  _ feels  _ insane just thinking about it. 

He’s like, ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain at this point that what’s been happening lately isn’t normal. But that doesn’t mean he’s ready for  _ Lance  _ to point out how not-normal this new weird thing is. 

“O-oh,” Lance says, opening and closing his mouth a few times as he blinks. “That . . . that makes sense.” He seems to recover his bearings then, because he flashes one of his usual cocky grins up at Keith—and  _ no _ , Keith’s heart  _ does not react  _ to that  _ at all _ —and says, “So, what’d you think, Mister Samurai? Did’ya like my moves? Were they awe-inspiring? Was I so intimidating that you were swooning in your combat boots?” 

“Hardly,” Keith manages to say in a semblance of his regular unruffled tone, even while his traitorous brain thinks:  _ you don’t know the half of it _ . “You were good, but I know you can do better. I’ve seen you under way more fire than that, being way more impressive than whatever you were doing just now.”

A few months ago, a comment like that would have ruffled all the wrong feathers. Now, Lance just sits up lazily on his elbows, his grin taking on a competitive edge as he says, “Oh yeah? Was that a challenge?” 

“I don’t know . . . I mean, do you think you can handle it? Or are you too infirm?” 

“What, this?” Lance bends his knee a couple times in demonstration, no hint of discomfort showing on his face. He smirks. “I’m perfect. Good as new. Ready to go whenever you are—that is, unless  _ you  _ can’t handle it?” 

Keith snorts at the shameless goading and reaches down a hand to help Lance to his feet. “Please. We both know that of the two of us, I’m—” He’s cut off mid-sentence by his own strangled gasp when Lance slides his hand into his without a single warning, using Keith’s weight and strength to lift himself off the ground. The instant the blue paladin’s skin makes contact with his is like a shock to Keith’s system; he feels sensation waxing and waning along every nerve cell on the surface of his palm, trickling and crackling its way up his hand and into his arm like lightning has been injected straight into his veins. But at the same time, the feeling is jarringly soothing, a balm to the itch that has been taking up residence beneath his skin for the past few weeks. The overall sensation is a persistent but not necessarily unwelcome burning, like applying moisturizer to cracked and bleeding skin. It stings, but carries the faithful promise that healing is oncoming. 

Keith yanks his hand back as soon as Lance is on his feet, stumbling away with his hand clutched to his chest and knowing shock must be written along all of his features. He knows it because he watches as Lance’s joking expression evolves from one second to the next in front of him, confusion and concern painting the planes of his face as he takes a step forward, reaching to ask if he’s okay, and Keith frantically takes another hurried step back. 

_ What the hell. What the hell, what the hell, whatthehellwhatthehellwhatthe— _

What just  _ happened?  _ What did he just feel? Did Lance feel it too? 

“I . . .” Keith stares, from his own hand cradled to him, to Lance’s own, now dropped to his side as his face twists in incomprehension. “Keith, what—did I hurt you? I’m sorry, I—” 

“No!” Keith blurts, because he doesn’t like the way guilt looks on top of the confusion. This is—it’s  _ weird,  _ and yeah, okay, now he thinks he has a genuine cause to be concerned for his wellbeing, but it isn’t Lance’s fault. Keith thinks. 

Whatever this is, he’s certain now that it’s connected to Lance somehow. But all the same, Lance has no idea what’s been happening the past couple weeks. What happened just now. 

Keith makes a split-second decision to keep it that way. 

“ _ I . . .  _ um! I just remembered that I, ah, I promised I’d help Coran clean the pods this afternoon. So that—uh, sparring . . . raincheck?” 

Keith cringes at just  _ how  _ poor that disaster of a delivery was. Lance stares at him, still confused as all quiznack but conceding as he registers what Keith is requesting. Demanding, with mortifying levels of panic. Keith will deal with that later. “Uh . . . o- _ kay _ ?” 

“ _ Great _ .” Keith bobs his head as he inches towards the door, still facing Lance, still with a phantom tingle vibrating along the radius bone of his right forearm. Lance watches him as he goes, perplexed at how strange Keith is acting no doubt, and he barely has enough pride to mutter out, “See you later, Lance,” before he ducks out the door and  _ sprints  _ for the med-bay. 

  
  


_____

  
  


Keith stares down at the data from the cryopod’s latest scan and feels frustration well up in him, so potent that it steals the breath from his lungs and pools unbidden behind his eyes. 

There is  _ nothing _ . 

His vitals are fine. His brain is fine. According to the scanner, his  _ skin  _ is even fine, perfectly healthy except for the scratches where his nails have broken it over the past couple weeks. There’s not even a trace of whatever happened on the training deck with Lance still in his system. There’s nothing. 

He doesn’t  _ get  _ it. How can the top-notch Altean medical equipment not detect whatever is happening to him? If he were perfectly healthy, why would his skin feel as if it’s  _ burning?  _ Now, there’s this cold ache in his chest that’s taken up residence next-door to the itch of his skin. He wonders if maybe he’s dying, and he’s so far gone that the scanner doesn’t see the need to tell him because it should be obvious. He wonders if he should tell someone. 

But then he thinks about what happened on the training deck. There had been that freaky shock, but then—but then something soothing had settled in over it. As if Lance’s touch were both the root of Keith’s problem and the cure for it. He thinks about how his core has seemed to want to gravitate toward Lance’s recently, like the center of the earth being tugged unbidden towards the moon. And then he thinks about trying to describe  _ that  _ to anyone, and feels himself burn in an entirely different way. 

_ No. Absolutely not _ . As he shuts down all the medical equipment, he resolves himself to stick this out himself. He’s made it this long on his own. It’s probably just like, space allergies or something, anyway. Or maybe it’s a seasonal thing for Galra, like he’s . . . shedding, or something. He’s shedding his skin. Which for some reason wants to be all over Lance. 

It sounds bad even in his mind. Keith locks himself in his room for the rest of the night and buries his nose in Lance’s jacket, which has become his only source of comfort recently. Even though it doesn’t really smell like Lance anymore. . . . 

He wonders if he could ask Lance to wear it around a little, just to get that nice combination of sweet smells back into the fabric, and then give it back. And promptly shoves that thought back down into the dark grotto from which it had arisen.  _ That is way too weird.  _

Still, the thought doesn’t leave him. And neither does the burning itch, or that heavy ache in his chest. In fact, the ache seems to grow worse in a seemingly endless rotation with the itch. The itch increases in intensity, which causes the ache to increase in intensity. He sees Lance when he walks into breakfast and the intensity exponentiates by ten thousand. He begins to reconsider the whole  _ what-if-I’m-dying _ thing. 

He knows that Lance has begun to pick up on the fact that something is wrong. And honestly, it’s all his own fault. 

The problem is, Keith  _ can’t  _ act normal around Lance anymore. It’s awkward, considering the . . .  _ reaction  _ he’s developed to him recently. Not to mention, it’s becoming borderline  _ painful  _ to be in close proximity to him when all he wants to do is be  _ closer  _ but he knows he can’t. Lance would think it’s weird and creepy, probably, and Keith doesn’t want that. 

Of course, the only alternative is for Keith to avoid Lance altogether—or at least, as much as he can outside of team training and Voltron. He hopes that Lance won’t notice that he’s stopped hanging around, hopes Lance won’t pick up on the way he’s forced to leave a room any time the other paladin enters it. But Lance is observant, and more than that, Lance is his  _ friend _ , so of course he notices. 

And, because he’s Lance, he is most definitely  _ not  _ okay with it. 

“What’s going on with you?” he demands to know one day, cornering Keith in the lounge while the others are off doing who-knows-what. Sciencey things, probably. He takes a step toward Keith and Keith instinctively takes a step backward, his heart seizing with sudden panic. It must show on his face too, because a flash of hurt sparks on Lance’s, and he makes no further move to get to Keith. But he doesn’t back down, his jaw set in determination. He came here on a mission. Keith already knows it’s not going to be easy to get out of this one. 

Still, he has to try. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says dumbly, eyes flitting surreptitiously to the doors at the other end of the room. He briefly considers throwing himself over the back of the couch and making a mad dash for it, but he knows Lance’s stupid gazelle legs would overtake him before he could even get there. 

Lance’s eyes are hard with unreadable emotion. “Don’t play stupid with me, Keith,” he says, and the tone of his voice makes his stomach churn with unease. He’s—disappointed? Fed up? “Something is up with you. I can never find you anymore, and when I do, you’re super jumpy and strange, and then you leave. I’ve been trying to figure out what I did.” 

Keith’s mouth goes dry. He really  _ does  _ feel like an idiot when he mutters, “What?” 

“What did I  _ do,  _ Keith?” Lance says, and he’s horrified to find that his friend sounds  _ desperate. _ It should be a crime for anyone to make Lance sound like that. Keith should be in space prison. “I . . . I miss you. I’m sorry if I did something, and I want to fix it. I don’t want you to avoid me like this.” 

“No, that’s . . . that’s not it at all,” Keith tries to explain without actually explaining—knowing how feeble the lack of information makes the claim sound to Lance’s ears. “I—you didn’t do anything wrong, Lance.” 

Lance’s eyes are deep blue and disbelieving. “If I didn’t do something wrong, then why are you acting this way? Why . . . ?” He raises a hand to tug at his own hair, takes another searching step forward. “Keith . . .” 

There’s that tug of gravity again, trying to yank Keith into Lance’s orbit. The nerves along his hands  _ itch  _ to reach, the dull ache in his chest  _ yearns  _ to be soothed by the balmy presence he knows Lance could provide. He wants to be close so badly that it’s a knife against his ribcage, pressing, but not quite piercing yet. 

Lance takes yet another step into Keith’s space. The tip of the metaphysical dagger pricks skin. Keith gasps, squeezing his eyes shut and grasping at his own arms as if that will be enough to stave off the ache. It isn’t. It’s  _ not.  _

“Don’t come closer,” he means to say, only it comes out as a tiny, pained  _ plea _ . “Lance don’t . . . just don’t.” 

“I . . . “ He doesn’t have to look to know that he’s hurt Lance—he can hear it in his voice, such sharp, biting emotion packed into a single, one-lettered word. And then he hears Lance put it away, closing it off for a coolness that is foreign coming from him, but a new kind of unbearable. “You know what? Fine. I tried to get you to talk to me, but I know how to accept when I’m not wanted. Come find me if you change your mind, I guess.” 

He doesn’t have to worry about trying to escape, after that. Lance leaves before he can try to formulate a way to ask him to stay. 

  
  


_____

  
  


It’s that very same night that the burning pain becomes unbearable. Keith tries to fight it as long as he can; he buries himself in his blankets, inhaling the clean scent of Lance’s jacket and bunching the fabric in his fists, trying to ignore the unpleasant stinging that’s started radiating along the lines of his bones. The ache in his chest expands in order to allow space for even _more_ emptiness, and this is a kind of pain that hurts worse than the physical. An itch, a burn, an _inferno_ is nothing compared to the freezing, gaping emptiness that loneliness resides within. A loneliness that twists in the form of a knife below his ribs, finally penetrating skin and bringing blood rushing to the surface. He’s bleeding, he’s spilling out all that emptiness, but more just wells up to take it’s place. And it’s not blood, it tears, Keith is _crying,_ and when did it get so bad, how did he get to this point, and why is he in front of Lance’s door in the middle of the night, hand raised to knock but fist shaking so badly that he can’t? When did he even leave his room to make his way here? He can’t remember. Everything is a blur. Everything is sharp and fuzzy at once, fading in and out as he shudders through each inhale, exhale, and it’s all he can do to keep his lungs in a semi-functioning order. Distantly he hears broken, watery sobs ringing out, but they don’t register as coming from him. 

Not, that is, until Lance’s door swings open, confusion etched into every line of his tired face. That sleepy confusion evolves into alarm almost immediately once he’s taken in Keith’s trembling, gasping mess of a self in the hall. “Oh my— _ Keith?  _ Keith, what’s wrong, what happened, what—” 

Keith is so gone at this point that all of his inhibitions are gone with him. He flings himself at Lance, throwing his arms around Lance’s neck and clinging with all of the intense desperation of a drowning child to a lifeguard, a shuddering and shaking and shredded mass of sensations, and he can barely even hear himself stumbling over words he never gave his mouth permission to say: “ _ I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I don’t know what’s wrong with me but it hurts, it  _ hurts,  _ please make it stop, please Lance,  _ please—” 

“Woah, hey, slow down. Keith, slow down, what hurts?” Lance’s voice flows into his ears, warmth layered over worry, with only the faint traces of panic detectable at the edges. His arms come to circle instinctively around Keith’s back and he sinks into it, a faint whimper escaping him as he closes his eyes and  _ feels _ . Every place Lance touches him burns like fire, but it’s the only thing combating the ice frozen over his ribs so he presses closer.  _ More, more, more,  _ he thinks, and he thinks he’s saying it too, a repetitive, mindless mantra, escaping as frantic, whispered pleas.  _ Please Lance, please Lance,  _ please—

“Okay, you’re seriously scaring me here,” Lance’s worried voice surfaces in his mind again, and after that the world dips and suddenly he’s on Lance’s bed, and the world feels a little less shaky but he’s still gripping at Lance’s neck like it’s the only thing holding him upright, and he can’t even be sure that it’s  _ not _ . And he’s burning and burning and burning, and Lance’s hands trail fire up and down his back and it’s agony and bliss all at once, and he presses his face to Lance’s neck to breathe through it only to be met with a face full of flames where skin touches skin, but these—these aren’t so bad. They’re like baby sun rays, warm and reaching to kiss, not meaning to harm. Not able to help that they burn. Within minutes he’s acclimated to the heat, and his gasps have tapered off into shaky, but mostly reliable puffs of air flowing to and from his lungs. The wildfire dies down until there are only little bursts of resistance waiting to be put out. Lance’s palms flatten against his back, and they douse them entirely. 

“. . . Keith?” Lance says tentatively, and his lips are so much closer to Keith’s ear than he thought they were. He feels Lance’s breath stir his hair. He feels . . .  _ okay _ . 

Hastily, fighting against every fiber of his being that begs him to  _ stay,  _ Keith scrambles out of Lance’s grasp and onto the edge of the bed. Lance lets him go, not fighting, but his eyes are watchful as Keith settles into his new position, poised just so that he’s able to spring up quickly if he has to run. 

“Sorry,” Keith whispers when he regains the ability to speak, his voice scratching against the dry desert of his throat. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . I didn’t mean to bother you. You were sleeping, right?” 

Lance’s emotions turn as quickly as the pages of a book, from surprise to incredulity, from frustration to resignation. “Keith, don’t worry about that. I’m not going to miss a couple hours of sleep when you just did— _ that _ . Keith, you have to tell me what’s going on, because that? Was  _ quiznacking _ terrifying.” 

Keith supposes he has no right to secrecy now, after he just used Lance in a way to finally ease the ailment that’s been plaguing him for . . . how long has it even been now? Movements? At least one phoeb. Even if Lance has no idea what he’s just done for Keith—even if  _ Keith  _ doesn’t really know, doesn’t understand why he needed to be near him so badly to begin with—he deserves an explanation. 

“Okay. Okay.” He nods, inhales, and gathers up the courage to meet Lance’s gaze. He doesn’t flinch back from the piercing blue, which is at least one embarrassment he doesn’t have to worry about tonight. “So there’s this . . . thing. That’s been happening for a while now.” 

Lance sits up straighter, folding his legs beneath him as he gives Keith his full attention. “For how long?” 

“Since you gave me your jacket.” 

He watches as a small furrow forms between Lance’s brows as he thinks back. “Keith that . . . that was over a phoeb ago.” 

Ah. So Keith’s estimation was close, sort of. He shrugs, but still feels so pathetically small when he says, convincing absolutely no one, “I was handling it.” 

“Right,” Lance’s eyes narrow on him. “Tell me what ‘it’ is.” 

So Keith does. Fumbling, he explains how it had started, how mild it had been compared to the absolute torture that it evolved to. An itch, then a slight burn, always related to Lance. Lance within close proximity, Lance touching his hand— _ Lance.  _ He tells him, somewhat desperately, that he doesn’t know what it means. He thought it was Galra allergies. He has no idea what Lance has to do with this, at all. 

Lance surprisingly—or not-so-surprisingly, depending on how you look at it—takes all of this in without any major or minor weirded-out reactions. He listens attentively until Keith’s stream of words tapers off, and then he jumps right into problem-solving. 

“So we can assume that this probably isn’t a human thing.” 

Keith swallows around the Sahara-level dryness of his throat. “Right.” 

Lance nods, looking as if he’s deep in thought. Then he reaches to unearth a holopad from somewhere buried within his blankets and begins to type. 

“Are you—are you  _ space googling _ my symptoms?” Keith wonders, meanwhile mentally cursing himself for not having the same idea earlier. Of course Lance would come along and find a stupidly simple solution after Keith just resigned himself to a fate of a slow, agonizing enigma of a death. 

Lance hums an affirmation, and mere seconds later he’s squinting down at the blue screen, eyes landing on some article and reading all the keywords aloud to Keith: “Itching, burning, coldness, loneliness—all those check out, Keith?” 

“. . . yeah.” He tries so hard not to feel embarrassed at the clinical simplification of his symptoms; after all, if Lance can be the perfect picture of poise right now, then so can he. Hesitantly, Keith inches himself back onto the bed so that he’s closer to Lance, just enough to peer over his shoulder at the screen. Lance clicks on the article and begins to read it out loud for the both of them anyway. 

“ _ The Galra species is a historically and evolutionarily defined pack species. This characteristic has done many great things for the species as a whole: most notably, it has ensured the overall survival and encouraged the thriving of Galra no matter their external environment or enemies . . . For information on Galra history and evolution, click  _ here —mm, no thanks,” Lance frowns, slightly impatient, and scrolls down the page a bit. “Blah blah blah, evolutionary trees, brain chemicals—ah! Here we go:  _ Like all forces in nature, with the benefits also come the detriments. Some of the most notable among Galra are the physical and emotional drawbacks that can occur if a Galra is estranged from their pack. These undesirable effects include itching and burning sensations of the skin, as well as physical aches mimicking those of rheumatoid arthritis.”  _ Lance pauses. “Galra can get rheumatoid arthritis? And it’s called the  _ same exact thing _ that it’s called on Earth? Just when I start to think maybe space could make a little sense, I read something like this . . .” he mutters, and then Keith nudges his shoulder, silently spurring him to continue. 

“Right.” Lance clears his throat, “ _ In Galra who are separated from their packs at extremely young ages—such a those who are orphaned or abandoned—they can develop what is known as packless depression. If they have remained alone throughout the duration of their childhood, in adolescence and adulthood they may go on to develop the pack-longing (colloquially known as  _ touch starvation _ ), which can result in many of the same effects as an estranged adult Galra. However, the effects of pack-longing when left untreated are much more debilitating than pack estrangement alone, often leading to unstable levels of brain chemicals that leave these Galra susceptible to alarming cases of depression, expose them to more illnesses that a healthy Galra would have no issue combating, inflict painful, sporadic fluctuating of bodily temperatures (such as, feeling as if one is burning or freezing when the external environment does not call for such reactions) that often lead to dea— _ Oh. Oh, no.” Lance tenses up, his face paling as he begins to frantically scan down through the article, too fast to read aloud. 

“Keith, if you’ve let this get too far for us to fix, I swear to Voltron I’m going to kill you.” 

“Well if I’m past saving, then you killing me is really just speeding up the process,” Keith attempts to joke weakly, only to be met with a severe glare that makes something inside his chest twist up in shame and guilt. He stays silent as Lance goes back to reading, scrolling faster than Keith’s eyes can follow until he reaches the end of the article. 

“Okay so, good news is: I’m pretty sure we can fix this. I’m guessing by this that you have this—this  _ pack-longing _ thing,” he says to Keith, a troubled frown pinching at the corners of his eyes as he scrolls back up through the article, pressing the bookmarking symbol at the corner of the screen before closing out of the article and shutting the holopad off altogether, tossing it somewhere in the corner of his bed. “It was bad enough that you were in debilitating physical pain, but you came to me with it, and I . . . I helped, right? You aren’t hurting now?” 

“No, I,” Keith stares down at his hands, which are their usual shade of pale but with a notable absence of a pressing itch that won’t go away no matter how hard he scratches. “I feel . . . fine. Like nothing was ever wrong.” 

“Okay. Good. That’s good. So you know what this means, right?” 

Keith blinks slowly, because he hasn’t actually thought that far ahead, but he guesses the answer is probably kind of obvious. “That . . . I’m all better now, and we can put this behind us and forget it ever happened?” 

Lance heaves a very long, very deep sigh. It’s the same sort of sigh Adam used to emit after spending hours trying to help Keith understand his quantum mechanics homework, and it fills him with a strange sort of homesickness that he hasn’t felt in the entire time they’ve been in space. Lance even has that perfected dead-inside hollow ring to his voice when he says, “No, Keith. That is absolutely not what this means.” 

“Then . . .” Keith blinks again. “Yeah, you’re going to have to clue me in. I’ve got nothing.” 

Another sigh. “Keith, you’re  _ touch starved _ . You’ve been feeling the delayed effects of touch deprivation for quiznack knows how long _ ,  _ and it’s gotten progressively worse to the point where you had to come to my room in the middle of the night cycle and latch onto me like a distressed octopus. You felt like you were going to die before you got here, and now you feel perfectly fine. What’s the differentiating variable between before and after?” 

Keith lets a stubbornly long period of embarrassed silence pass between them before he grudgingly answers: “. . . you.” 

“Ding ding ding. Oh look, you can use your brain after all.” Lance presses his lips into a thin line as he looks at Keith, and Keith wants to be pissed at him for being so snide, but Lance is already pissed enough for both of them. “I  _ cannot believe  _ you let yourself suffer for so long when I have literally been right here the whole time. We have  _ all  _ been here this whole time, Keith. We’re your family, and we  _ care _ about you. Why didn’t you come to us about this?” 

And it’s then that Keith understands that Lance isn’t just angry with him—he’s hurt. The guilt in his chest intensifies by about a thousand, and he feels his face flush with it as he looks down to avoid the tense emotion painting itself out across Lance’s face. 

“I didn’t—it’s not that I don’t trust you guys. But this is . . . it’s  _ weird  _ and I was—” Keith cuts himself off, too close to giving more honesty than he’d initially planned to. But Lance latches onto it like a persistent tick, genuine curiosity and soft concern intermingling with the unyielding steel in his dark blue eyes. 

“You were what, Keith?” 

Keith sets his jaw tensely and fixates on a piece of peeling skin around his thumbnail. “I was . . . scared. Okay?” 

He refuses to look up, so he doesn’t see the way Lance’s expression softens out. But the same gentleness is there in the two careful, calming breaths he allows himself before putting away his anger and frustration, and it’s there in the way he says: “Okay. Okay, that’s . . . it’s okay, Keith. It’s going to be okay.” 

Keith curls his fingers into his palm without looking up; he  _ hates  _ how vulnerable he feels, hates how Lance’s platitudes actually manage to quiet some of the discordance in his mind. Some, but not all. “How can you be sure?” 

“Because.” In a single, carefully-meditated movement, Lance closes one of his warm brown hands around Keith’s own, uncurling the fingers from their clenched position. Warm bubbles fizz along the lines where their skin touches, but it’s nowhere near the intensity of the sensation from before. All it does is fill Keith with a pleasant, welcome heat. “Now that we know, we can make sure it won’t happen again. We’ll tell the others tomorrow, and we can set up some kind of system so you can adjust to—” 

“ _ No _ ,” Keith blurts, cutting off Lance’s stream of words as he sits up hastily, looking up into Lance’s face. “Lance, we  _ cannot  _ tell the others about this. Promise me you won’t.” 

“I . . .” Lance’s brow tense in confusion. “But—why not? They’ll want to help, Keith. They’ll probably feel really bad that they didn’t know—I mean, I do too, we’re your  _ family  _ and we had  _ no idea _ —” 

“Exactly,” Keith interrupts again. He grips Lance’s hand in his tightly, unconsciously. “They would feel terrible. I don’t—can you imagine telling Hunk or—or  _ Shiro _ that I could potentially  _ die  _ just because I didn’t get enough hugs as a kid or whatever?” 

“Keith.” Lance frowns. “They would want to know. It’s the only way we can help—” 

“I  _ don’t want them to know, Lance _ ,” Keith snaps, his words brittle and his hand shaking slightly beneath Lance’s, but already his mind is made up. He tries to envision telling the others about this—this  _ condition _ , sees pity etch itself across every one of his friends’ faces as it comes out. He’s never wanted sympathy from any of his friends; the last thing he would ever want is for his friends to think of him as weak. He’s not  _ helpless _ . He made it on his own for years in a harsh and careless system; he survived a year of solitude in the quiznacking  _ desert,  _ of all places. That’s not something he’s ever been ashamed of, and he hates that a reason to be has just been dumped in his lap. He doesn’t  _ need  _ this. He was doing just fine alone. 

“Keith . . .” He can hear the urge to argue rearing up in Lance’s voice—but then it fizzles out as a sigh. “Alright, I can already tell you’re going to be a stubborn idiot about this. But I have conditions, if you really want me to keep this from everyone else.” 

Irritation and gratitude well up in equal measure inside Keith’s throat, and he swallows them both down enough to say, “Name them.” 

“You have to be fully honest with me, going forward. You tell me if you start to feel even the  _ slightest  _ bit uncomfortable, because I am not letting you progress to that horrible level again if I have any say in it. Which I do, now. I’ll have to do some more reading, but from that article alone I got the gist that pretty much the only cure is a gradual acclimation to physical touch from people you consider close friends or family. So from now on, consider me your official designated cuddle buddy.” 

Those are horrible conditions. Keith absolutely does  _ not  _ want to consider Lance his  _ cuddle buddy  _ under any circumstances. He doesn’t particularly like the idea of having to keep Lance updated on his feelings—of all things—either. 

But it’s either that, or . . . 

“Fine,” Keith acquiesces with a grumble. “As long as you promise not to tell the others, fine, whatever. I’ll consent to your dumb terms.” 

Lance’s lips don’t lift out of their unhappy curve as he says, with a gravity that makes something beneath Keith’s skin shiver uncomfortably. “Your wellbeing isn’t  _ dumb,  _ Keith. You know that, right?” 

Keith forces himself to keep the discomfort from showing on his face. “Right. Sure, yeah.” With that, he stumbles over himself to his feet in a quick series of graceless motions, and makes a gesture for the door. “Well, if that’s all . . .” he begins to say. 

“Uh,  _ no _ .” Lance levels him with the most supremely unimpressed glare Keith thinks he’s ever received in his life. He points at the space beside himself on the mattress and then at Keith. “What about  _ potentially terminal touch starvation  _ don’t you get? Lay your ass down here, Kogane. And don’t you dare move from this spot until I can be sure you aren’t going to have another breakdown.” 

With stiff, jerky movements and an erratically beating heart, Keith lets himself be maneuvered back onto the bed and into place beside Lance. With everything sorted out, it appears Lance has the single-minded intention of going back to sleep, and evidently he’s not going to let Keith ruin his mission. Even though he’s technically forced Keith into sharing his space for the night, decreasing his room for comfort by a denominator of two. He feels guilty about that, even as he inwardly complains about how unnecessary this all is and how dramatic Lance is being. He feels perfectly fine after being within the circle of Lance’s arms for a few minutes. The chances are high that he’d probably survive the rest of the night okay without him. 

But . . . can he  _ really  _ be sure? He thinks about getting back to the level of pain he’d been at before and feels fear coalesce into something solid and cold in the pit of his stomach. He thinks sharing a bed with Lance is nothing to complain about, compared to that. 

But . . .

“Quit thinking, you’re so loud I can practically hear your thoughts,” Lance grumbles, pulling Keith’s mind away from the edge of the rabbit hole. With a sigh, the blue paladin flips onto his side so he’s facing Keith’s side in the near-darkness of his room. Their only light source comes from the bar of blue light over the door, glowing soft and unassuming. It’s just enough to highlight the bones of Lance’s cheeks and cast shadows beneath his lashes. 

“Listen, I know this is probably really uncomfortable for you. I mean, obviously—that’s sort of the root of this whole problem. And I . . . I’m  _ sorry _ , because I don’t  _ want  _ to make you uncomfortable, but you aren’t the only person who can feel scared, Keith. You get that, right?” 

Keith shifts onto his own side so that he’s face to face with Lance, closer to him than he thinks he’s ever been, save for the night on the observation deck. There’s a certain, strange stillness that’s settled over the space surrounding them, quieting their breaths to an intermingling symphony of near-silent sound. It feels almost like heresy to break it, so Keith keeps his voice at a whisper as he asks him, “Why are you scared?” 

He’s not sure what sort of answer he’s looking for; what he is sure of is that it’s not the painstaking honesty that infuses every word when Lance speaks. “Because I care about you, Keith. A lot. And the thought of you dying—for any reason that I could have prevented, but also just generally—is scarier to me than you can imagine.” 

“. . . oh,” Keith says in a small voice. He can’t think of anything else  _ to  _ say. He’s never been very good at responding to honest emotions from the people he cares about. Luckily, because this is Lance, he doesn’t have to say anything. The blue paladin simply snorts, and Keith gets the feeling that if the lights were on he’d be able to see Lance rolling his eyes. 

“Yeah, Keith.  _ Oh _ . Now . . .” There’s some shuffling with the blankets, and then Keith feels something warm and lithe snake itself across his abdomen. Lance’s fingers catch on the fabric of Keith’s shirt near the side of his ribcage and make their home there. Keith thinks his lungs stop operating when this happens. “This okay?” Lance murmurs, obviously not taking note of the fact that Keith is no longer breathing. He sounds tired enough that he probably doesn’t. 

“Uh—mmhm,” Keith croaks out through his lack of air supply, and feels more than sees Lance nod his head in acknowledgment of his consent. He settles down and makes himself more comfy, leaving Keith to stare wide-eyed up at the ceiling, wondering how he came to be here in this situation. 

He’s in Lance’s bed, he thinks—and that thought seems to break the dam in his mind that was precariously holding his sanity in place. Lance is sleeping beside him in his bed. He’s expecting  _ Keith  _ to sleep in his bed. Keith has never slept in a bed with another person before. What if he does it wrong? What if he accidentally hits Lance in the face? That could happen, right? What if he—

Sometime in the middle of his mind-ramble, his eyelids begin to feel very heavy, like the solid weight of Lance’s arm resting on his lungs. Keith blinks with strenuous effort, and when he can no longer manage that, he allows them to simply fall shut. His last conscious thought before sleep reaches up to wrap around him is that he thinks, maybe, this might not be the worst predicament he’s ever found himself in. Despite the strange circumstances, he feels more comfortable than he has in . . . a long time. 

  
  


_____

  
  


Keith regrets everything almost immediately. Honestly, he should’ve just let himself die. He’s probably going to die anyway. 

The very morning after Keith’s resolve to stick this out alone breaks, Lance constructs this— _ schedule.  _ Like, he honest-to-quiznack creates a spreadsheet so they can plan when they’re going to, as the blue paladin horribly dubs it “ _ get their cuddle on _ .” Just looking at all of the colored time slots makes all of the blood drain out of Keith’s face, because that’s . . .  _ a lot  _ of time. Keith doesn’t even spend that much time in the general  _ vicinity  _ of another person, most days. Much less Lance. And Lance is just . . .  _ okay  _ with that? With Keith suddenly taking up so much of his day? 

“I don’t know, Lance,” he says uncertainly as his eyes flit from  _ 11:00 - 1:00 CST (Post-Lunch)  _ to  _ 3:00 - 5:00 CST (Pre-Dinner)  _ to  _ 8:00 - ? CST (Unwind & Chill Time).  _ He doesn’t like how the last time slot is left open on top of the four vargas Lance has definitively outlined. “This is . . . it’s a lot.” 

Lance frowns down at his holopad screen, as if trying to pick apart where he went wrong. Evidently, he finds nothing. “Is it the post-lunch slot? Because I mean, I don’t really do anything after lunch and I figured you’d be free too, since like—we’re stuck on a spaceship. What the hell are we supposed to do outside of training and missions anyway? But if that doesn’t work for you I can move it . . .” 

“No. Lance.” Keith shakes his head, feeling more and more uncomfortable the longer the blue paladin doesn’t understand. “I mean the—the  _ time  _ is a lot. It’s . . . too much.” 

Lance blinks up at Keith as his eyebrows scrunch, a little furrow appearing between them. “That’s kind of the point, Keith. I mean, we don’t know  _ how  _ much you need. We have to keep you from getting so low that it hurts you, and the faster we can do that, the better.” 

Keith supposes he gets where Lance is coming from, a little. Still, the fact remains that Keith isn’t  _ used  _ to this. He’s still trying to wrap his mind around the fact that they’re  _ negotiating times _ for him to essentially spoon with Lance so that he won’t  _ die  _ of the Galra equivalent of arthritis. Keith’s never been close enough to a person in any way to warrant being that close to them, and he’s pretty sure that being that kind of close to someone isn’t supposed to happen like  _ this _ . 

Whenever Keith imagined being close enough to Lance for this to be allowed in their relationship, he never imagined it would happen like this. And he just feels kind of frustrated because—part of him thought they would maybe get there  _ eventually _ , if he’s being honest. But not so fast, and not out of necessity. When he thought about curling up beside Lance in bed, he always thought it would be because Lance wanted to be with him. Not because he’s afraid his teammate will fall into an agonizing depression without him. 

“I just . . . it feels like too much,” he says, sounding strained to his own ears, and Lance must hear it too because he sits up and sets the holopad to the side to consider him for a minute. 

Whatever he finds, it causes his expression to soften out. “Okay, then,” he decides, “If you think it’s too much, we’ll knock a couple vargas off. I guess I just forget that this might be weird for you.” 

“Oh, like it’s not for you?” Keith shoots back, arching an eyebrow in challenge. But Lance only quirks his lips in a smile. He shakes his head. 

“Nah. When I was a kid and all of my siblings were still young enough to live at home and stuff, we had to make a spreadsheet like this because they were always fighting over who got to spend time with me. Which—I guess that sounds sort of weird without context,” Lance laughs a little when Keith stares at him, skeptical and bewildered in equal measure. He goes on to explain, “Okay, so, we’re a really touchy family, right? We grew up in a kind of small house, so it’s inevitable that we were always on top of each other. And I was the baby of the family—y’know, the cutest, youngest, most endearing McClain child. And I’ve always been an affectionate guy, and according to nearly everyone in my family I’m the best at cheering people up when they’re sad. It sort of got to the point where Veronica, Luis, and Rachel would fight after school over who had the worst day so that they could just goof off with me and watch a movie and cuddle or whatever after we finished our homework. And that sounds kind of weird too, like, why couldn’t we just all hang out together? But let’s just say my siblings fought a  _ lot  _ when I was a kid, over literally anything and everything. I mean, they were all in middle and high school when I started kindergarten, so I guess it makes sense . . .” Lance makes a face and shakes his head, and Keith laughs a little. “But it definitely wasn’t always fun. Thus, eventually Marco got fed up with everyone and created a google sheet called ‘Lance Time’. It sort of stuck around until everyone else moved out.” 

He’s smiling a little, affection displayed starkly on his face as he reminisces about his family, and it kind of makes Keith want to smile too. It kind of makes his chest ache with longing. “That sounds . . . weirdly, sort of nice,” he says, somewhat lamely. But he has to admit, as foreign as the idea of having siblings like that is, he can’t help but wonder what if would have been like if he’d grown up with the same type of family. How different he would be. 

“It was,” Lance confirms, and then he blinks and his blue eyes clear of nostalgia. His smile, which he directs at Keith, is all for him. It’s dazzling. It’s unfair. “So, anyway. I think this’ll be good for me, too, because I miss that, you know? Like, the only person I really cuddle with out here in space is Hunk, but he doesn’t always have time for it. It’ll be nice to have this again.” 

He nods, as if to confirm his own conviction; the way he says it, Keith is a more than a little inclined to believe him. At the very least, he doesn’t feel quite as bad for taking up Lance’s time. Evidently, he’s more than willing to give it. 

That still doesn’t mean it isn’t weird or uncomfortable for Keith. It’s just slightly . . . less. 

“Right,  _ so,  _ we can take off the post-lunch slot I guess, but I  _ always  _ nap after afternoon training and naptime is prime cuddle-time, so you aren’t getting out of that,” Lance starts again, picking his holopad back up to begin typing away again. “And I was thinking at night we can do facemasks and watch movies and . . .” 

Keith kind of tunes him out after that, but he nods at all the appropriate places and scowls at all of the ones he feels warrant it, and while he’s doing that he’s thinking:  _ okay. Okay. Naps. Facemasks. Movies. I can totally do this _ . 

He’s foolish enough (maybe hopeful enough) to actually believe it for a moment. 

But then the reality of it all sets in. 

“Keith.” Lance had sprawled himself across his bed the second they came back to his room, immediately burying his face in the pillows with a groan. Keith silently agrees; Allura is in charge of afternoon training and she is  _ brutal.  _ Keith still comes away from practice with her aching, and they’ve been doing this Voltron thing for over a year now. (At least, according to Pidge’s calculations, it’s  _ probably  _ been a little over a year. But space-time is weird, so who actually knows.) It’s impossible to  _ not  _ hone in on the empty space beside the blue paladin. It’s impossible to compute the fact that that empty space is there for  _ him _ . 

Lance is peering up at him from the pillows, head tilting inquisitively. “Everything okay?” 

“Uh.” Keith is standing at the end of the bed, shifting on his feet. “Yeah, just . . .” He can’t put into words how much  _ weirder  _ this all seems in the daylight—metaphorically speaking, anyway. It had been weird enough last night, when they were both exhausted and probably not at their best cognitive levels. But today, they’re both wide awake. Fully conscious of what they’re doing. 

Before he can let himself think about it too much, he forces his body into action and sits down on the side of the bed. And he just . . . sits there. 

“Ah, Keith?” Lance says tentatively, after a couple minutes pass. “You can’t take a nap if you’re sitting up.” 

“I don’t nap anyway,” Keith says, a little offhand, a little defensive. Maybe kind of snappish, but where Lance would normally comment on that, he only sighs and sits up. He tugs lightly at Keith’s shoulder to get him to face him. 

“Hey,” he says, with a careful lilt to the word that Keith simultaneously despises and desperately wants to hear again. He sort of hates how  _ nice  _ Lance is being about all of this; he doesn’t know how to react to it without feeling pathetic. He doesn’t know how to make his heart stop going insane whenever he’s in the other boy’s atmosphere. “This is just like last night—except, y’know, you’re not close to  _ dying  _ this time. I swear I’m not going to do anything like, weird or anything. You know that, right?” 

“What? I—yeah, of course I know that.” Keith scowls, shaking off Lance’s absurd approach at assurance. “It’s not  _ you _ . I mean, it’s . . . it’s kind of you. Mostly it’s—me,” he admits grudgingly. Lance knits his brows in confusion. 

“You? What about you?” 

Keith groans, letting his head fall into his hands as he lets the full wave of his mortification sweep over him. “Nrrvrdnthisbrre.” 

“Uh . . . what?” 

Keith sighs. “I’ve never . . . done this. Before.” He runs a hand through his hair as he tries his best to explain. “I didn’t grow up with siblings who fought over who got to cuddle with me after school. I don’t know how this works, or—or how close is too close, or . . .” He shrugs weakly. “Yeah.” 

“Oh.” Keith is suddenly aware of how Lance’s hand, which he has yet to remove from his shoulder, is somehow radiating heat to Keith’s skin even through the fabric of his shirt. The minor itch that’s been slowly but steadily making its comeback all afternoon is already beginning to ebb from the single point of contact. “I get it,” Lance says, drawing his mind back to the present even as he squeezes his shoulder in what Keith is pretty sure is an attempt to comfort him. (Somehow, it kind of works.) “And . . .” he goes on, “I know this is probably really awkward for you. But I don’t want it to be, okay? I promise that it’s not really as weird as it seems. We’re going to take a nap because we’re tired from Allura punching us around the training deck. I’m going to use your stomach as an armrest, probably. I’ll probably fling my leg over you too because I’m a clingy sleeper, but if you have a problem with it, you can push me off, no big deal. And if  _ you  _ want to be closer, or you just move closer unintentionally, you can do that, because there’s literally no such thing as too close to me. I have no concept of personal space. Okay?” 

Keith stares down at his hands, where his fingertips are barely visible at the ends of the sleeves of Lance’s jacket. Because of course he’s wearing Lance’s jacket; he’s  _ always  _ wearing Lance’s jacket now. The reminder of the jacket—and thinking about all of this, this whole situation, and Lance in it—makes a lump of emotion swell up in Keith’s throat. “I don’t get it,” he chokes out quietly, watching his fingers run the fabric between them. “How are you such . . . such a good person?” 

When he looks up at him, Lance is blinking, visibly stunned for a moment before he’s able to pull his expression back together, into something somewhat amused and slightly fond. “I’m not a good person, Keith,” he says, “I’m just your friend.” They’re simple words, but Keith thinks there’s a lot there that could be unpacked. A lot that, quite frankly, Keith doesn’t feel like he has enough interpersonal experience to try to tackle. “So, are we gonna nap or what?” 

“I don’t nap,” Keith repeats himself obstinately, but allows himself to be pulled down into a mirror position of the previous night. He’s lying on his back with Lance facing him on his side, curling an arm over Keith’s torso as he shuts his eyes with a contented sigh. He shifts minutely closer, just enough to rest his forehead against the side of Keith’s shoulder. “This is nice,” he murmurs, then, “This is nice, right? You good?” 

“. . . Yeah,” Keith decides, after a moment’s deliberation. Lance’s presence beside him is solid and warm, magnified in all of the places where he touches him. His chest feels light, even if he doesn’t necessarily feel tired. He thinks he’ll be okay to just lay here and—be, while Lance sleeps beside him. And if Lance isn’t going to make this weird, then he’s going to try his best to adopt the same attitude. 

Lance knocks out almost instantly. (Keith wonders how he does it. It takes him  _ hours  _ to fall asleep most nights, and up to a half-varga even when he’s exhausted beyond reason. It’s kind of unfair that Lance can just do it at will.) He settles into him as he settles into sleep, arm shifting every now and then to adjust, head tilting against his shoulder. True to his word, his leg eventually hooks itself around Keith’s, and to his own surprise he finds that he doesn’t really mind it. It’s a sort of pleasant heaviness, a weight that feels more grounding than constricting. Keith allows himself to relax into it. 

Contrary to his own word, Keith does something he’s only ever done a rare handful of times in his life. He closes his eyes, and he takes a nap. 

  
  


_____

  
  


The weirdest thing about this entire situation, Keith finds himself thinking a couple weeks into their . . . arrangement, is how quickly it becomes  _ not  _ weird. 

Like, of course it’s weird at first. Keith has no idea what the hell he’s doing. No one explains to you how to be physically close to another human being in a way that isn’t weird or awkward or uncomfortable for one or both parties involved. There’s a lot of accidental head-butting and hands brushing weird places and limbs falling asleep at random times and apologizing. Well, all of the apologizing is Keith, because he feels like everything he’s doing is wrong. It goes something like this: 

They’re laying in Lance’s bed a few days into this, arms around each other’s waists because that’s apparently a thing they’re doing now, and Keith’s fingers accidentally brush Lance’s bare skin where his shirt has ridden up. “Sorry,” he blurts, and yanks his hand away as if Lance is on fire. He feels as if he’s on fire. His face is on fire. 

Lance just lazily cracks open one eye to peer at him, unconcealed amusement greeting him in the approximate shade of cobalt blue. “It’s fine,” he says, then goes right back to dozing like it’s nothing. Keith feels a little bit like he’s dying. 

This continues to be a pattern over that first week—Keith being embarrassed and Lance being annoyingly calm and amused about this whole thing—but once he’s familiarized himself with how it feels to lay beside someone in close proximity, how it feels to fall asleep with  _ Lance’ _ s arm curled over him and his even sleeping breaths puffing warm and light over Keith’s neck where his head is tucked near his shoulder . . . his embarrassment is eventually overridden by how much he  _ likes  _ it. 

It’s kind of unfair, how no one had ever thought to inform Keith about how nice this whole physical contact thing is. For one thing, it’s so warm that he doesn’t even need to wear Lance’s jacket whenever they’re laying together in Lance’s bed. He had never really taken into consideration just how important warmth is to him until the whole thing with his jacket happened, and then the only reason he had thought about it was to think about all the negative effects of being deprived of it. But the thing is, just being next to Lance highlights all of these new positive, pleasant feelings about warmth that he doesn’t think he’s ever felt before in his life. Curling up with Lance is how he imagines laying down in front of a fireplace must feel, in some cozy mountain cabin back on Earth. The heat radiates directly from his skin into Keith’s own, filling his heart with something that simmers and glows; in a way, it kind of feels like home. The way he imagines home would, anyway.

He always finds himself craving it when it leaves, and it draws him back in, again and again, until it’s just a normal part of his routine to follow the unconscious path his footsteps make for him back to Lance’s room at the end of the day. And Lance is always just there  _ waiting,  _ with that empty space on his bed reserved just for him, with an easy smile and a spark in his eyes that makes it feel as if this is just something he and Keith have been doing forever. He’ll automatically reach to pull back the blankets for him, and as the days pass, the feeling of being drawn under by Lance’s arms becomes less of a strange inevitability, and more of a welcome comfort. 

He finds that it’s easier to be brave, once he has a general idea of what he’s doing. It’s easier still to learn the scent of Lance’s skin firsthand, nose pressed to his collar while the other boy tucks his chin over Keith’s head. Cinnamon and vanilla and something just inherently  _ Lance  _ become as familiar to him as the generic scent of his own shampoo, and whenever he leaves Lance’s room, he finds that the smells linger, clinging to his own skin like a going-away gift. A promise that it will still be there when he comes back. 

They don’t just cuddle (by now, Keith has reluctantly accepted that that is, in fact, what they’re doing): some nights Keith will come to Lance’s room to find there’s some cheesy Altean movie pulled up for them to watch on his holoscreen (he loves rom-coms, while Keith prefers the cringey Altean horror movies that Allura and Coran both insist are  _ classics _ ), or he’s got a couple packets of sheet masks in his hand, or there’s some old card game he used to play with his siblings that he wants to teach him. Those are the things that make Keith forget that it’s only some strange Galra condition that’s led him here; there are the moments where he can really lose himself in the illusion that things have always been—always will be—this way. 

It’s moments like this: Lance has some disgusting pink goo that he insists is  _ good  _ for his skin smeared all over his face, reaching with cold fingers for Keith’s face while he cackles maniacally and Keith tries to squirm uselessly out of his grip (but they both know that if he really wanted, he could easily fend Lance off). Or like this: they’re watching a horror movie at Lance’s own insistence, but he’s been hiding his face in Keith’s shoulder for the better part of a varga, ever since the first Altean in a tacky ghost costume made an appearance. He complains when Keith laughs at him but he doesn’t move away, and suddenly Keith is so aware of how  _ normal  _ this feels, how warm he is all the time now, and it makes his heart ache when he comes to the stark revelation that he doesn’t want this to stop. 

He wakes up one morning after accidentally falling asleep in Lance’s room to find that at some point in the night, Lance’s head had wound up on his chest. His light brown hair tickles the skin of Keith’s jaw, and he’s somehow trapped Keith’s left arm beneath his torso—meaning that the limb is definitely dead—but Keith feels the solid warm of Lance’s heart beating against his own and he realizes, between one inhale and the next:  _ I’m in love with him _ . 

The strange thing is, even though he’s never thought it before, it feels natural in his mind: it’s like it always been there, the same way it’s natural that his name is Keith, that he flies the red lion. It’s not a thought so much as it is a fact. His name is Keith, he flies the red lion, and he is in love with Lance McClain. 

It’s such an uninhibited realization, in fact, that his mind doesn’t register at first what a dangerous precipice he’s found himself on. It takes nearly a full day of the thought just being there in the back of his mind before he finds himself once again in Lance’s bed, just watching the boy talk and trying not to smile at the way he speaks with his hands—trying not to think of how much he’d like to kiss those hands, that mouth—and then it hits him like a slap in the face. 

None of this is real. He  _ knows  _ this—he had known it, going into this, that Lance is only doing this because he can’t afford not to. Lance isn’t the type to ever let any of his friends suffer, even the one as prickly and standoffish as Keith. But that’s strictly all it is: Lance is his  _ friend _ , and he  _ knows  _ this. 

And all at once, he feels a sudden surge of something like guilt, or shame, or some ugly admixture of the two. Because how can he sit here and monopolize all of Lance’s time, now that he knows exactly how he feels? It feels wrong somehow, like he’s taking advantage of Lance’s kindness, like now the situation has become tainted. 

The worst thing is that he  _ knows _ Lance: he knows that if he were to explain this to him, Lance would be so incredibly understanding and supportive that it would be physically painful for Keith. He can’t even try to lie to himself and tell himself that Lance would be disgusted with him, because that isn’t the kind of person he is. He would be flattered, probably; he would feel bad, definitely, for not being able to return Keith’s feelings. Because that  _ is  _ the kind of person he is: empathetic even to the point of bringing another’s heartache upon himself. 

And the thought of that has him recoiling, because what he has with Lance right now is  _ good _ . He likes things the way they are. But now there’s this  _ development  _ separating them, and Lance doesn’t even know it, and Keith doesn’t  _ want _ Lance to ever know it. He doesn’t want to ruin what they have by bringing unnecessary feelings into it. He also can’t just . . .  _ be  _ around Lance all the time, anymore. He may not be the most socially adept person, but even he can see where this is going if he just lets things continue on as they are. 

And even though he doesn’t want to, he forces himself to think rationally, and what he comes up with is this: this is fine. It’s been a long time coming, really, because it’s been weeks since he’s felt any serious effects of the pack-longing condition. He’s fairly certain that he’s no longer in any danger of exploding if he doesn’t spend consistent portions of the day glued to Lance’s side and—well, that  _ was  _ the goal, wasn’t it? To get Keith back to a place where he no longer feels like he’s dying whenever he goes for too long without someone giving him any sort of tactile connection. 

It was going to end eventually. That’s what Keith tells himself—not that it really comforts him in any way. He thinks that it’s good that this has happened, even, because now this means Lance can actually get his life back. They’re at dinner that night when Hunk suggests a bro night for the two of them—”I feel like we haven’t done anything together in  _ weeks _ , man, what’s up with that?”—and while Lance tries to laugh it off casually, claiming, “Oh, you know, I’ve just been super busy lately . . .” Keith tries to subtly, silently urge him to accept. When Lance’s eyes drift to him, he nods his head at Hunk, conveying with his eyes what he hopes reads as:  _ GO, hang out with your friend!  _ and not:  _ GO, because I’ve kind of fallen in love with you and really need to stop that as soon as possible, so please stay away from me for the time being.  _

Lance just blinks back at him, not getting any of that. With a barely held-back groan, Keith pushes himself away from the table and walks out into the hallway. 

Predictably, not even a full minute passes before Lance comes out in search of him. “Hey,” he says, a concerned furrow between his brows as he takes in Keith, just leaning against the wall outside the dining room. “Everything okay?” 

“It’s fine,” Keith says, forcing himself to channel all of the coolness that he definitely doesn’t have, but he still hopes it’s enough to convince Lance. “Listen, I think you should hang out with Hunk tonight.” 

Instead of smoothing out, the line between Lance’s brows creases even further. “What? Why?” 

To which Keith stares at him in disbelief. “Are you asking me for a  _ reason  _ why you should go play videogames with your best friend?” 

“Well, I mean, no . . .” Lance says, though there’s an element of uncertainty to his voice that he either chooses not to mask, or just can’t hide. “But I thought—I mean, nights are  _ our  _ thing. You’re one of my best friends too, you know. And . . . y’know, we didn’t hang out after training today, so . . .” 

That is true—for the first time in weeks, they hadn’t. Keith had rattled off some bullshit excuse as to why he couldn’t—something about needing to help Shiro with something— _ just  _ so he wouldn’t have to deal with falling asleep beside the guy he’s literally just figured out he’s in love with. That’s a brand of torture that Keith wants to avoid at all costs: hence, why he’s here now. 

His throat feels tight, but he says, “I’ll be fine, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just . . . I don’t want to make you feel like you have no options, okay? You shouldn’t  _ have  _ to spend every night with me. That’s unfair to you.” 

“But—Keith, we’ve already been over this?” Lance frowns, his confusion only growing as he looks at him with those wide, earnest blue eyes. “I  _ like  _ spending time with you. It’s not like I never see Hunk, or any of the others for that matter—it’s just that, it’s not the same with them as it is with you, you know? And it wouldn’t be fair to  _ you _ , if I just up and ditched you out of nowhere.” 

Keith looks over Lance’s shoulder, fixating on a blank patch of wall so he won’t have to look into his eyes anymore. “Look,” he says, trying to think up any honest reason he can for why he suddenly  _ wants _ Lance to ditch him—that isn’t the  _ actual _ truth. He’s grasping, but what he manages to come up with is actually half-convincing, “I like spending time with you, too. It’s—nice. But I . . . I don’t know how healthy it is, to spend every night like this. And I think I need to figure out if I can even spend a night without you, now. Think of it as . . . an experiment.” 

Lance raises an eyebrow, dubious. “An experiment.” 

Keith bobs his head in a weak attempt to back himself up. “Yeah. Like, how long I can go now without physical touch, now that I’ve gotten used to yours. I mean—that _ is  _ important to know. Because what’ll happen if one day we’re on separate missions that last more than a few hours? Or what if I’m stranded somewhere and it takes you a few days to find me? I need to know if I’ll be able to handle it.” 

“That . . .” Lance presses his lips together as he thinks about it, before reluctantly admitting, “I guess that is a good point.” 

Keith feels his heart rise a little in relief, even as Lance gives him a serious, hard look. “But you swear you’ll come find me if you feel it getting bad again?” 

Heart in his throat, Keith nods. “I swear,” he says. 

In hindsight, they both probably should have seen from a lightyear away that Keith wouldn’t keep that promise. 

At first, it’s not so bad. Keith spends the night the way he spent his nights before Lance became an intrinsic part of them. He trains for a while, and then he trains for a while longer. He takes a shower and puts Lance’s jacket back on, trying to ignore the way it no longer holds any of its original scent, trying to ignore the way even with the jacket on, he still finds himself feeling a little chilly. 

With nothing else to do and no desire to go to bed early, Keith goes in search of Shiro. 

He finds him already in bed, but the glow of a holopad casts gentle blue light over his brother’s face, so he doesn’t feel guilty for padding into the room and making himself at home at the foot of the bed. 

“You’re going to hurt your eyes,” he informs him, instead of just greeting him like another person probably would. Shiro rolls his eyes, says, “I’m pretty sure retinal damage is the least of my concerns right now.” But he puts the holopad down anyway and flicks the switch by his bed until the room glows with dim light. Shiro looks at Keith, head tilting thoughtfully as he meditates on something for a moment. Eventually he says, “What’s wrong?” 

Keith blinks, balks. “I . . . nothing? I have literally said  _ nothing  _ about anything being wrong. Why do you always assume something is wrong? 

Shiro raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Nine times out of ten, when you come rouse me from my slumber in the middle of the night—” 

“You weren’t  _ sleeping _ . And it’s  _ ten o’clock _ —” 

“—it’s because something is wrong,” his brother finishes, ignoring him like the terrible person he is. “Plus, I know you, Keith. You think I can’t tell when something’s bothering you?” 

Keith shifts, suddenly finding the pattern of the Altean bedspread highly more intriguing than Shiro’s face. “Nothing’s bothering me,” he mutters. “Have you never considered the possibility that I might want to just spend time with you?” 

“Aw, that’s touching.” Keith doesn’t like or appreciate the amused tint to his voice. He’s beginning to regret seeking out Shiro’s company. “So there’s . . . nothing you want to talk about, then? Nothing at all?” 

“No.” Keith glares with all of the venom he can muster. “I hate you.” 

Shiro hums, unaffected. They stare at each other for a few moments. Keith fidgets with the sleeve of Lance’s jacket and pretends that he doesn’t feel his skin beginning to prickle in the telling way it does before the itch sets in. He even manages to fool himself into thinking that he doesn’t want to spilll everything out to Shiro, for a moment. 

He wonders, for a moment, if it would be so bad to tell Shiro about what’s been going on with him. If he explained the whole pack-longing thing and how inconvenient and unnecessarily painful it is. If he told Shiro about how the only reason why he’s able to function like a human being is because of Lance, and how his feelings for him have been steadily spiraling out of control since this all started. 

But then Keith really considers it. And at the same time, he takes note of the bruise-like rings beneath his brother’s eyes, indicating that sleep hasn’t been any kinder to him lately. He thinks about how much Shiro does for the team and how he’s always here for  _ Keith _ , even on random nights when Keith just doesn’t feel like being by himself with his thoughts. And he thinks about the unneeded worry that it would cause Shiro to know what Keith’s been dealing with lately, on top of everything else he already has to constantly manage inside his own head. And he thinks that he can’t be that selfish. 

But with a sigh, Keith figures that there is  _ something  _ he can be honest about, and figures it’s only fair to do so. He has, after all, interrupted Shiro’s night, even if all he was doing was reading trashy Altean romances in the dark again. He might as well give Shiro some  _ real  _ disastrous, non-existent romantic drama to be amused by. 

“Okay, fine. Maybe I wanted to talk about something. About Lance.” 

Shiro has the audacity to not even pretend to be surprised. Instead he says, “Oh. I was wondering when you were going to come to me about this.” 

Keith feels his brows crease in confusion as he looks at his brother.  _ What? _ “You mean . . . you already know?” 

“That you and Lance are dating?” Shiro very obviously eyes the jacket around Keith’s shoulders. “Well I didn’t think it was a secret.” 

Keith actually chokes on his own spit. He sits there, spluttering for a good minute, while Shiro looks at him as if he’s locked into an intense battle between amusement and concern for his brother’s wellbeing. The amusement is winning. Keith thinks he might  _ actually  _ hate him. “I—Lance and I—we’re not  _ dating _ . Why would you even think that?” 

“Look, it’s not a big deal,” Shiro says in this placating tone that Keith thinks is meant to make this make sense. “Allura and I already talked about it, and we both agreed that the two of you seem to be much better together than not. We would never make you guys break up because of Voltron.” 

“I— _ what _ . . . ?” Keith coughs, still not recovered from nearly choking to death. “Shiro, what are you  _ talking _ about?” 

Shiro looks at him then— _ really _ looks at him, taking in the sheer bewilderment that Keith isn’t trying to hide. His brows crease, a line furrowing the skin between them as his own confusion sets in. “You mean . . . you  _ haven’t  _ been avoiding telling me about you and Lance because you’re worried about how it will affect Voltron?” 

“I— _ no?”  _ And Keith  _ hasn’t _ , until now. He supposes it’s good to know that he’d have Shiro’s—and Allura’s, evidently—blessing if, in fact, there was any way Lance felt the same way about him. “Lance and I  _ are not dating _ , Shiro.” 

“Oh.” Shiro somehow looks even more confused. “But . . .” 

“But?” 

“But—you spend all your time together now. You guys leave training together, and you always hang out at night, and on missions recently, you always pair up before I can even tell anyone we  _ are  _ pairing up.” 

“We’re getting along better,” Keith counters, “And anyway, is it  _ so  _ weird that we hang out? All of the others hang out with Lance, so why can’t I without it meaning we’re—y’know?” 

“I’m not saying you can’t do that, Keith,” Shiro says gently, “And if you are just friends, that’s okay too. But . . . Keith, he gave you his jacket.” 

“I get cold easily. After mine got ruined, he found out. And then he pretty much forced me to take it.” (Keith pointedly leaves out the fact that he had wanted to take it. Never mind the fact that he hasn’t regretted it a single moment since.) 

“Oh,” Shiro repeats. He sounds like someone who’s had his entire viewpoint shifted one hundred and eighty degrees; he sounds like someone who’s just realized his favorite childhood cartoon was the victim of a mandela effect. “So then, if you and Lance aren’t dating . . . what did you want to talk about?” 

Keith exhales, shifting so he’s leaning more against the wall, settling his hands into his lap and watching as the excess fabric of Lance’s sleeves pool over his fingertips. He thinks of how strange it is, that his brother and the princess and probably  _ everyone _ assumed they were dating, without either Keith or Lance ever confirming the theory. He thinks about how he’s seemingly turned Shiro’s world upside-down in the span of approximately five minutes, and how he’s probably about to give him the  _ worst  _ case of whiplash. 

“Lance and I aren’t dating,” he confesses lowly, fidgeting with the sleeves now. He closes his eyes so he won’t be tempted to look at Shiro’s face when he admits, “But I am in love with him.” 

“Oh,” Shiro says a third time. There’s silence for a moment, and then the sound of shuffling as the empty space beside Keith suddenly fills up with his brother, shifting to sit with his back against the wall next to him. “So . . . I’m just going to take a wild guess here. Since you and Lance aren’t together, you aren’t happy about this.” 

“No,” Keith agrees. “I am not.” 

Shiro nods. Then he nods some more. “So have you considered telling him?” 

“No,” Keith replies again, more defensively this time. “Shiro, I  _ can’t _ tell him. I won’t.” 

Shiro shifts beside him, and without even looking he can tell that Shiro is scrutinizing him, analyzing the situation, determining how to tread. Lightly, he says, “Why not?” 

“ _ Because _ .” And his brother is always so, so good at figuring out how to get Keith to talk. But then, Keith supposes he wouldn’t be here if he  _ didn’t _ want to talk to him about this, so he really has no one to blame but himself. But as soon as he tries to find the right words . . . he can’t. 

“What we have—me and Lance,” he struggles, trying to explain how  _ much  _ it’s become without explain the  _ how  _ of it; trying to explain how much it’s made him feel, too much, too fast.  _ Not enough _ . “I  _ like  _ it. It’s easy to be with him and . . . and it’s never been like that before. With anyone. I don’t want to mess it up by bringing  _ feelings _ into it.” It’s like the very thought of it is barricaded in his mind—he mentally  _ cannot  _ accept the idea of screwing up his friendship with Lance. He wishes that he’d never even realized what he felt went deeper, because then he could just go on obliviously indulging in Lance’s smiles and warmth and dumb cuddle spreadsheet without feeling so guilty that the very thought of touching Lance makes his skin crawl. (Of course, he’s been without Lance for nearly a full day now and his skin is crawling anyway, but that’s not the point. The point is: it’s just a lose-lose situation, all around.)

Shiro asks him, “But, Keith, haven’t you ever considered that maybe Lance feels the same way?” 

Keith thinks, in the part of his mind that is hopeful and nineteen, that he  _ has _ . And he thinks that’s the worst part, because it’s so  _ easy  _ for his mind to indulge in what it would be like to be with Lance. He thinks that everything would be exactly the same, except for this: 

When they would nap in the afternoon, Keith would tuck his face into Lance’s neck and press a kiss to the warm, bare skin there before falling asleep. When they would watch movies, Lance would rate every rom-com on how much the relationship pales in comparison to theirs, and he would jump on every single horror movie as an excuse to just cuddle even more than they already do and exercise his dramatic abilities to Keith. And he would indulge him every single time, because he knows what Lance is doing and because it is so  _ stupidly endearing _ . And at the end of every night they’d kiss, and Keith would say “ _ I love you,”  _ and Lance would call him “ _ Babe”  _ or some equally as dumb pet name, and Keith would make it a point to complain but he’d secretly love it and Lance would  _ know _ . 

And there are the other things—the things he won’t think about while sitting next to his brother on his brother’s bed. But they’re  _ there _ , and now that the thoughts are in his head they’re not going anywhere, and the thing is it just  _ aches _ . Because Keith thinks it would be so easy to just wake up and call Lance his boyfriend. Because the word  _ boyfriend  _ sounds natural, easy,  _ right  _ in conjunction with Lance’s name. 

But the reality is that all of those things that tell him it  _ might  _ be possible—a soft smile directed at him here, a gentle brush of his thumb over skin there—is instantly overwashed by the fact that none of it is  _ real _ . 

Because the thing is, in every single one of those fantasies, Lance is touching Keith because he  _ wants  _ to. But in this universe, he does it because he feels like he’s obligated. Because Keith has a condition that literally binds him to the people he cares about, and Lance is just the unfortunate victim who found out first. 

And Keith never, ever wants Lance to feel obligated to him in this way too. Because he  _ isn’t _ . And Keith will be perfectly content to just have Lance as a friend for the rest of his life, so long as he doesn’t lose him at all. 

“I don’t want to lose him, Shiro,” he says instead of answering the question. Finally he looks up at his brother, finding that gentleness and empathy that he had denied himself he had come seeking for. Shiro doesn’t always get it, but he’s always there. He’s never let Keith down before. That’s what gives him the courage to admit, low and defeated, “But this is . . . it’s really hard.” 

“I know it is,” Shiro says softly. It’s like a suckerpunch to the stomach when Keith realizes that—shit, Shiro  _ does _ . And he’s  _ actually _ lost someone before. 

Keith curls his knees up to his chest, and he just feels  _ bad _ . For himself, for Shiro—for all of them, being out here in space, sometimes feeling so directionless in this fight that they lose sight of what the point of it even is. 

“You deserve better,” Keith eventually says, because he feels like he  _ has  _ to. It’s the truth, but sometimes he’s not so sure Shiro knows. Shiro had deserved better; someone who would stay, someone who wouldn’t throw everything away when their days were already numbered enough. Someone who wouldn’t break his heart just to protect their own. 

Shiro, for his part, doesn’t look brokenhearted now. He smiles at Keith, something that’s a little wistful, a little sad, but mostly accepting. Okay. “And you deserve to be happy in love,” he tells Keith. It’s like they’re teenagers, swapping secrets in the dark, sharing truths that will never see the light of day. In a way, Keith thinks that illustration isn’t far off. It feels close enough, anyway. 

“I guess we’re both out of luck then, huh?” But to his surprise, Shiro doesn’t agree with him. He just looks at him for a long moment, as if internally debating his response. Amusement is playing at the corners of his mouth when, finally, he shakes his head. His eyes are light, a sort of brightness Keith doesn’t think he’s seen from him in a while. He’s not quite sure what inside joke has made him look this way now. Whatever it is—even if it’s at his own expense—he can’t say he isn’t grateful. 

“Not quite,” Shiro tells him, and this doesn’t sound like a secret reserved for the hours when no one is likely to be listening. It sounds like an affirmation, just waiting for the sun to rise and confirm its truth.

  
  


_____

  
  


Keith fights it for as long as he can. 

It’s nearly two full days of dodging Lance’s questioning stares, avoiding him at meals and answering him in short, monosyllabic words whenever he has no choice but to respond. He doesn’t go to Lance’s room once, instead opting to hang out (read: hide) in Red throughout most of the day and into the early night. He doesn’t wonder if Lance is looking for him, not even once. At least, that’s what he’d like to be able to say. 

But in the end, just as he’d feared, it gets to be too much. A gentle, barely noticeable tingle turns into an intense irritation that encompasses the entire surface of his body. And then his skin decides it would be a fun idea to pour lighter fluid over the already persistent burn and then throw a lit match onto it, and Keith finds himself sitting on the floor outside Lance’s room, almost shaking as he waits for him to come back. He could just go into his room, but Lance isn’t there, and something about the idea of laying in his friend’s bed without him there makes him feel uncomfortable. Like it would be some sort of invasion of Lance’s privacy, even if he’s been in there with Lance dozens of times. 

Finally, after what feels like an eternity of waiting, he hears soft footsteps padding down the hall towards him. Then he hears a sigh, something half-relieved and half-exasperated, and Lance is suddenly sitting beside him on the floor, one arm coming up to circle around Keith’s shoulders and draw him into his side. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” he says. 

“Sorry,” Keith mutters in reply, but he’s more focused on burying his entire face in Lance’s shoulder than he is in being heard. He closes his eyes and breathes in alien cinnamon, vanilla, juniberry-scented laundry detergent,  _ Lance _ . “I just—I wanted—” he tries to explain before Lance can even ask, because he knows Lance deserves at least that much. “I feel so—debilitated, without you. And I don’t . . . I don’t  _ want  _ to be this dependent. It’s not fair to either of us. I’m sorry.” 

“Keith,” Lance replies softly, his sigh tousling Keith’s hair where his mouth rests against the top of his head. “You never have to apologize to me for this.” 

“But that’s the thing,” Keith says, “I always feel like I should.” 

“You never have to,” Lance repeats firmly. “I care about you, Keith. You never have to apologize when the people who care about you take care of you.” 

Keith nods against his shoulder, even though he doesn’t really get it. He’s not sure he ever will. 

“Let me take care of you,” Lance says, voice softer now, only loud enough to reach Keith’s ears. “Please, Keith. Don’t shut me out.” 

Again, Keith nods. He lets Lance pull him to his feet, then nudge him down gently onto his bed a moment later. He joins him, holopad in hand, ready with a movie just like this is any other night. It’s not any other night, and they both know this: there’s something unspokenly sad about it, the circumstances that have brought them here, that have made them like this. Lance wraps his arm around his waist and curves his body around Keith’s, and for the first time it occurs to him that if he’d had a normal childhood—maybe one like Lance’s, with messy siblings and supportive, present parents and an adoring and affectionate niece and nephew—then he and Lance really  _ wouldn’t  _ be here right now. He could have avoided this pack-longing syndrome entirely, if only someone had loved him before it was too late. If only his dad hadn’t died too soon. If only his mother hadn’t left before he could even recognize her face. 

Keith doesn’t usually think in what ifs, because it hurts too much. Tonight, though, he can’t help it. Tonight he wonders. Tonight, he allows himself to hurt. 

And if Lance holds him just that much tighter than usual throughout the night, neither of them says anything about it. 

  
  


_____

  
  
  


Something is . . . off. 

It doesn’t occur suddenly: it’s an unconscious awareness, an itch that scratches below the surface of Keith’s skin until it is crawling, inexplicable. It’s something that’s both physical—muted, compared to how awful it  _ can  _ be, but it’s there—and metaphysical, transcending Keith’s ability to reason out or explain. He doesn’t even realize it at first. 

But something is off.  _ Something _ doesn’t feel right. 

And he cannot for the life of him puzzle out what it is. 

Since that night, sleep doesn’t come as easy to Keith. Lance falls asleep with his face pressed into Keith’s hair, hands curling around his waist as he breathes in that unfaltering pattern of unconsciousness, leaving Keith laying awake and wondering why he suddenly feels so out of place. It’s like his body has up and decided it doesn’t want to be here, even though in his mind, there are few places he’d rather be. (And while there are parts of him that feel unswervingly guilty about that, he’s gradually learning how to accept it. At least, he’s trying.) 

Something just isn’t right. He writes it off as just being some byproduct of the two days he secluded himself from Lance, and he tells himself he just needs time to get readjusted. He tells himself this for an entire movement before he begins to doubt it. 

He runs through every possible reason why he could possibly be feeling this way, examining his emotions and actions from every angle until he feels like the simple process of breathing is something that requires a microscopic scan. But the lab results never come back with any sort of sensible explanation as to why this is happening. (And Keith knows this because he ends up doing another cryoscan on himself. He’s getting increasingly tired of the Altean tech always telling him that he’s perfectly fine when he feels so far from it. He feels like he’s slowly losing his mind.)

It’s nighttime when it hits him, as whatever Altean movie they’re watching is drawing near to the end. Keith’s pressed himself closer to Lance than usual in a desperate last resort to make whatever this feeling is go away, because the longer it goes on, the bigger the lump of unexplainable emotion grows in his throat, and this is unbearable mainly because he can’t figure out what that emotion  _ is _ , but also because he can’t figure out what’s brought it on. He’s got his nose pressed to Lance’s neck, and the scent of cinnamon, vanilla, laundry detergent, something-like-rose-scented moisturizer, Lance, something else, new and unidentifiable—

And then Keith’s entire mental train grinds to a sudden, grating halt as he realizes. The something that’s been bothering him isn’t a thing within  _ himself _ . It’s . . . it’s  _ Lance _ . 

Something is off with Lance. Something about Lance  _ smells different _ . 

He hates how animalistic that thought process makes him sound, even in his own head. But it’s  _ true _ . It’s not like when Lance is trying out some new lotion he got at the swap moon, or like he smelled that one time after they were on Truxhrul and he got sprayed by that weird sparkling skunk creature. Those things make him smell different—sometimes good different, sometimes really,  _ really  _ bad different—but it’s in an  _ external  _ sort of way. This isn’t like that. This is something deeper, something that burrows beneath the concept of skin pores. 

It’s like there’s—less of him, somehow. Like his own personal scent, the quality that makes it  _ him  _ has been diluted by something overpowering and distinctly  _ other _ . And Keith doesn’t understand why this could possibly be the case. 

So in the wake of this unsettling revelation, he begins to theorize again, with a fresh perspective and the exact same percentage of confusion. He thinks about  _ Lance’s  _ emotions: combing over every interaction they’ve had lately for any glitches in their normal dynamic. But Lance is normally pretty open with Keith if he’s having a bad day (he gets homesick a lot, and that can make him pretty snappy and abrasive sometimes; Keith doesn’t mind, thinks that he deserves to be able to let himself feel every now and then without someone making it a big deal,  _ especially  _ Keith) and he thinks that, even if Lance was holding back something, Keith can read him well enough now that he’d pick up on it if anything was off with him. 

But Lance is just as Lance-like as always: he’s as warm as sunshine when he holds him, brighter than the stars beyond the castleship’s walls when he smiles at him, loud and fond as he speaks about things from Earth that Keith could never possibly understand, and then about the things from space that he does. And Keith listens, with even more intent than usual, to the cadence of his voice as his words rise and fall, trying to find anything telling, anything that isn’t quite right. But there’s nothing absent there—everything is just as it always is (just as he’d always like for it to be). 

When he thinks about what Lance could have maybe  _ done  _ recently to have this effect, he comes to the same metaphorical dead end. Lance does what they all do: he trains, and he fights, and he forms Voltron with everyone. He jokes with Allura and helps Coran out with castle maintenence and hangs out with Pidge and Hunk after lunch. He naps with Keith after training; he watches low-quality Altean soap operas and comes up with his own script because Pidge hasn’t gotten around to creating subtitles yet. He takes care of his pet cow. He stargazes in the middle of the day. 

Keith is lost. 

Inevitably, he gives in and turns to the articles Lance had sent him. But even they don’t give him any clear answers. He finds out that Galra evidently have a keen sense of smell, which explains  _ how  _ he’s able to detect this difference in Lance—but none of them give him anything pertaining to  _ why _ this difference occurred in the first place. 

He has no choice but to accept it. He’s going to have to tell Lance. So far, every time he’s tried to hold something back from him, he ends up finding out anyway. At least if he tells him directly, he can cut down on the weeks of stressing and agonizing over it. Even if it turns out that there’s nothing they can do about it and Keith is just meant to suffer for the rest of his life. At least then, Lance will know. 

But then, that very night at dinner, a new concept presents itself in his mind. 

It’s a barely-there niggle at his consciousness, tugging at the threads of his rationality as he once again finds his eyes straying over to Lance. Lance, who is telling some anecdote about his sisters and Varadero beach, reminiscing for the entire table something that makes them all feel a little bit lighter. 

And he’s sitting next to Hunk (like he always does) and Hunk will occasionally chime into the conversation (like he always does). The thing is that Lance and Hunk already had a really close relationship established before Voltron, so they have a fair share of stories featuring one another, even the ones about their families and homes. They have this sort of timeless friendship that Keith’s never really understood, but it’s always some kind of sentimental to see. Sometimes it’s biting, toeing the line of bitterness, of knowing  _ you’re never going to have something like that _ . Most of the time, though, it’s sweet. It’s nice to see that people are capable of having so much history—that people can, in fact, and  _ do  _ choose to stay. 

Before Voltron, Keith had never really believed that was possible. Now, though . . . well. Sometimes he allows himself to wonder if maybe he was wrong. 

But he’s not thinking about Lance and Hunk’s relationship on this night. Instead, he’s thinking about Lance and Hunk’s  _ relationship _ . 

They’re just friends. Keith knows this because there have been several times when alien diplomats have assumed, based on the two’s interactions, that they were some form of married/mated/in whatever alien equivalent of that the planet in question calls it when two or more individuals are romantically involved. And every time, Lance and Hunk have hyped it up to the point where it’s little more than a joke. “ _ Me and Hunk?”  _ Lance had cried that first time,  _ literally  _ cried tears of laughter. Hunk had been too busy cackling on the floor to give any sort of verbal comment. 

So, yeah. Lance and Hunk—they’re just super close, platonic best friends who sometimes appear as if they’re dating. Everyone knows this, and there’s not a doubt in any of their minds that it isn’t true. So it’s not really the nature of their friendship that marks itself up in red pen inside Keith’s brain, circling and underlining and marking through until he can barely even read the situation through the angry inflamed color. 

It’s the fact that Keith  _ knows  _ how Lance is with his close friends. He knows it, because he experiences it firsthand every single day and has been for months. He thinks about how he had noticed something wrong almost immediately after those two days spent apart; thinks of how, the night before that, Lance had been with Hunk. 

He thinks about how, since then, he’s been trying to convince Lance to hang out with Hunk more—because he  _ can  _ survive without Lance, just as long as he gets  _ some  _ form of connection during the day. And that problem is easily solved by their hour-long napping sessions after training. 

And he absolutely does not,  _ does not  _ like the trail of breadcrumbs his brain has set for him to follow. This is a very dangerous path to travel. This implies that Keith is—

What, jealous? But that doesn’t make any  _ sense _ . Keith isn’t a jealous person; logically, he doesn’t have a single issue with Lance being close to Hunk. Hunk was there  _ first _ , anyway, so even if he did have an issue, he’d have to get over. He knows this, logically. But then he brings in the unexplainable mess that is his  _ emotions _ and—

He feels terrible. He feels  _ wrecked _ . Because Lance smells different these days because of  _ Hunk _ , but Hunk is his best friend, and Keith doesn’t have the  _ right  _ to get all weirdly territorial as if Lance is  _ his,  _ so why. . . . 

Why now? He doesn’t get it. Why does any of this have to become a thing  _ now _ ? And why does the thought of Lance smelling a little bit like his best friend leave Keith feeling like his insides are being slowly carved out of his body with a paring knife? 

Lance is getting into the story now, arms flying wildly as he gestures, and he leans a bit too far to the left. Hunk sets a hand on Lance’s shoulder to steady him, and this little needle of anxiety pierces Keith through the ribcage so sharply that he can’t even  _ breathe.  _ It’s so stupid: it’s  _ one  _ touch, and it’s not any kind of criminal. Keith doesn’t have the right to feel this way. 

But he does: he can’t  _ help it _ . So he winds up leaving before the story is even finished, excusing himself from dinner and trying to pretend he can’t feel Lance’s eyes on his back, watching him go. 

It doesn’t end there. Like always, it just gets worse. Shortly after Keith realizes what the source of this latest problem is, he sneaks into Lance’s room with the sneaking suspicion of what he’s going to find. He feels horrible for it, definitely like he’ll have  _ no  _ decent explanation if Lance walks in, but he presses his face into Lance’s pillowcases and sheets and just breathes it in. 

And as he thought, it’s not just on Lance. Hunk’s been in Lance’s room recently. He’s been on his bed. 

He’s almost dizzy from the momentum of the tetherball of distress and confusion, whipping around to knock him off his feet again. He doesn’t  _ understand _ . 

He thinks that he hates whatever Galra biological software he’s been programmed with. He thinks he’d hate  _ anything  _ that makes him like this. 

And he can feel himself right on the verge of something horrifically ugly, something dangerous and scary and volatile and what he doesn’t want to be, what he  _ never  _ wants to be, because he’s never wanted to be difficult for the people he cares about to handle, he’s never wanted to be demanding and needy and clingy, taking up more space than he should—but recently those are  _ all  _ things he’s become. And now throw in this— _ possessiveness _ —on top of it, and he just . . . 

He wonders if this is something that’s been a long time coming. Like maybe it’s—a Galra thing. Like maybe  _ this _ is what’s driven the empire mad, and now it’s finally come to claim Keith too. 

Whatever caused it, it leaves Keith’s insides feeling like they’ve been disturbed and shaken up like a carbonated drink, leaves him feeling explosive and volatile, leaves him with the awareness that he’s about to bubble over and make yet another huge, inconvenient mess on the floor, and he doesn’t have a single idea on how to stop it from happening. 

This latest batch of emotions culminates on a day that, Keith imagines if they were on Earth, would be rainy and dreary and cold, a biting winter wind smacking across the face like the blunt force a whip. Out here in space, it’s just a regular day. 

They’re in morning training, after a long night of Keith laying awake staring at the ceiling and growing increasingly more frustrated with the thoughts swirling around his mind like he’s got a quiznacking black hole up there instead of a brain. Some sort of group exercise: they’re each fighting their own cluster of droids, but they have to keep a constant eye on their teammates in their peripheral. It’s a bit like checking your rearview and side mirrors when driving, in a way; they’ve done it enough time that it’s like instinct, as simple as checking your blindspot before switching lanes. 

It’s a  _ habit _ , at this point, which is the excuse Keith feeds himself when his eyes always, inevitably, fall back to Lance. 

Or today, to Lance and  _ Hunk _ . 

Somehow, the two have backed themselves into a corner. They’re holding up their end of the fort pretty well, considering the fact that they’re both long-ranged fighters. Lance has resulted to some pretty crafty tactics that involve, but are not exclusive to, bashing the bots repeatedly in the head with the butt of his gun, deriving probably far too much glee from this as Hunk bodily barrels through the others with a dramatized battle cry. In the background, both Shiro and Allura are looking on with admixed horror and fascination. 

“Guys,” Shiro tries anyway, “Guys, that’s not really the purpose of this exercise—”

“Nor is it in  _ any  _ context a proper way to fight,” Allura chimes in, vocalizing her disapproval, but it’s lost in the din of Lance and Hunk, now apparently singing some sort of cartoon theme song as they swing each other around. The bots keep coming for them. Lance kicks one in the face. 

Or, tries to, anyway. The droids have evidently been adapting themselves to the paladins’ shenanigans, because even though kicking isn’t exactly a typical Altean fight maneuver, the droid lifts a hand and grabs Lance’s ankle as if he’d just been waiting for him to do it. There’s a moment of near-comical silence as the blue paladin’s eyes widen with surprise—and then he’s tossed onto the floor with a yelp, flailing the whole way down. 

“ _ Lance!”  _ Hunk cries, running over to fall to his knees beside his friend’s body. Lance, still prone on the floor, coughs and pats his chest, as if to reassure himself that his lungs are still in the right place. “Are you okay?” Hunk says worriedly, also patting Lance’s chest, his shoulders, his arms, his head. “Are you injured? Do you need to go into a pod?” 

“The cryopods have nothing on the healing powers of your sunshiney smile, Hunky-bear,” Lance replies with this flirty little wink, and then he sits up with a smile already back on his face as he reaches to take his friend’s waiting hand, ready to get back to training. And Hunk says something else, something that Keith can almost but not quite make out—he  _ can’t _ make it out, though, not really, because he’s too busy honing in on the two’s clasped hands with an increasing amount of  _ something  _ beginning to bloom in his chest. 

It’s not a something good. It’s like a garden of thorns, carelessly pricking as they emerge, twisting themselves between and around the vital organs there. It is ugly and jagged, the full image of it so sickening that Keith can feel bile rising in his throat. 

He doesn’t throw up, but he does destroy one of the droids beyond repair. And then a second one, for good measure. He’s just so  _ angry _ —with himself, with his  _ stupid  _ feelings and his alien brain chemistry for making him think it’s  _ okay  _ to act like this. It’s not okay. It  _ isn’t _ . 

“Woah, hey,” Keith suddenly hears from behind him, and suddenly Lance is pulling him off of the second droid and turning him to face him. His eyes are as blue-hued calm as they always are, but his face is pinched in some places with unspoken concern. “Keith, what’s . . . what’s up, man?” 

“ _ Nothing.  _ I’m fine,” Keith snaps, but there’s no real bite in his words. It takes him a moment to figure out why his voice sounds so off; it’s thick with the emotions he’s been fighting off all day, with the pressure of held-back tears. 

Lance carefully brings a hand up to Keith’s face, alarm taking over the blue of his eyes as he brushes a thumb across his cheek and it comes away wet.  _ Not-so-held-back tears,  _ then. Keith wants to die. He thinks he actually,  _ literally  _ wants to go eject himself from an airlock somewhere—

When he tries to tug himself away from Lance’s grip, he’s met with firm resistance. “Lance, let me go,” he says, somewhat desperate as he just stands there in front of him, with nowhere to hide. 

“No. Tell me what’s wrong,” Lance insists in a low, urgent voice. Keith just shakes his head. No.  _ No.  _ He doesn’t want to tell him—doesn’t want him to  _ know _ , because then he’ll hate him—he  _ will _ —

“I could never hate you,” Lance tells him firmly. His hands are still warm on his face, warmer where his fingers reach to swipe away tears that Keith has no control over. “Let’s step outside,” he murmurs. 

The only thing worse than Lance witnessing this is thinking about how  _ everyone else  _ is witnessing this. He feels his face begin to burn from a warmth that doesn’t come from Lance, and he can’t look at anyone as he nods and blearily follows Lance out, eyes glued to his shoes. 

“Tell me,” Lance says again, as soon as the doors close behind them and leave them alone in the hall. He reaches for Keith’s hands, warmth spreading out from the places where his fingertips press into his skin. 

Keith feels like he’s been backed into a corner. He doesn’t really have any other choice. 

“I—I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I don’t know why something is always  _ wrong  _ with me.” 

“Nothing is wrong with you.” Lance squeezes his hands. “But I need you to tell me. You promised you wouldn’t shut me out anymore, remember?” 

Keith wants to argue that he’d never actually  _ promised _ . He wants to start a fight, take them back to the early days of their tentative friendship when a single off remark could start a localized war that lasted for days. If they fight, maybe Lance will get frustrated and angry and leave him alone and stop  _ looking  _ at him like that—like he really, genuinely cares about Keith’s dumb problems, even though it’s the thousandth time this week he’s had some kind of breakdown. 

_ How are you still here?  _ he wants to shout at him.  _ Why haven’t you given up already?  _

But he doesn’t say that. Instead, he explains it to him, as best he can, exactly what’s wrong with him. It sounds as bad as it  _ is _ , and he knows it, and he knows Lance must be realizing it too. And he thinks:  _ this is it. This is the moment where he finally walks away. This is when he realizes that he’s in over his head.  _

His voice is heavy with defeat by the time he finishes speaking, and he keeps his head bowed so he won’t have to meet Lance’s eyes when he says, “So—yeah. Look, I  _ know _ it’s messed up. And I don’t want to be—I don’t—I’m not  _ like  _ this, Lance. I swear I’m not. But . . . but if this is too much, I get it. I really do. This isn’t your problem, it’s mine, and if you don’t want to deal with it anymore, I understand.” 

For a long, tense minute, an all-consuming silence envelops the hallway. Keith can’t even think, the quiet so loud that it takes over everything. And then, like a spell being broken, Lance sighs. 

“Keith . . . when are you going to finally get it through that thick skull of yours? I’m not going to leave you to deal with this alone.” 

Keith can barely keep himself from flinching at the words. “Because you feel bad for me.” 

“Because I am your  _ friend _ . There’s a difference, Keith.” 

Keith keeps his gaze firmly on the ground and doesn’t reply. After another quiet moment, Lance sighs again. And then he reels Keith in so that he can tuck him beneath his chin, against his chest. 

“We’ve dealt with everything else,” he says softly. “We’ll deal with this too. I’ll do more googling. And . . . listen, maybe . . . maybe we should ask Allura, or Coran—” 

“No.” Keith shakes his head emphatically, or as emphatically as he can with his face pressed to Lance’s neck. “ _ No _ , Lance. I don’t want to get them involved.” 

Lance hesitates. “This isn’t just your burden to bear, you know. Even if it’s a Galra thing, none of us like to see you hurting. Even Coran and Allura.” 

“Please,” Keith says tightly. He closes his eyes. “Please, I . . . I don’t want to talk about this.” 

“Keith,” Lance says, and for a moment, Keith thinks Lance is going to argue with him. But then he just squeezes him tightly before letting him go, stepping back with a reluctant acceptance. And then he catches Keith’s eye and smiles, sunshine-bright as always—like nothing’s strained, like nothing’s wrong. 

“Let’s just go take a nap,” he says. “When we wake up, everything will magically sort itself out.” 

Keith snorts; and like that, the heavy mood is lifted. He’s never going to understand how Lance does that. “Since when do you believe in magic?” 

“Uh, since when do you  _ not _ ? We’re on a quiznacking magic castle spaceship, Keith.  _ You  _ have a magic glowing knife. You’re like . . . like  _ space Rapunzel _ .” 

“Call me space Rapunzel one more time. I dare you.” 

“ _ Keith,  _ is your mullet actually magical? Is that why you refuse to cut it?” 

“ _ Lance _ —” 

  
  


_____

  
  


Despite Lance’s optimism, things don’t magically sort themselves out. But they do begin to get better again. 

Because Keith broke down and told Lance about how his room smells off, the blue paladin suggests they move to Keith’s for the time being. Keith doesn’t really mind; their rooms are pretty much the same anyway, as most of the rooms on the castle are.

Quite quickly, though, Keith finds his room being overtaken with Lance’s stuff. It starts of as leaving his holopad on Keith’s desk after the first night he falls asleep in his room. Then all of his skincare products wind up in Keith’s bathroom. His armor finds a space hanging up on the wall beside Keith’s. His pajamas find a place in Keith’s dresser. 

“I might as well just move in,” he jokes one day, picking up all of their collected dirty clothes to throw down the laundry chute. And Keith’s not sure what it is—maybe the fact that he finally feels like they’re returning to something their brand of normal, or maybe just something about seeing Lance so at ease and  _ domestic _ —but somewhere he finds the nerve to say, “You should.” 

Lance goes still, and then tilts his head at him, curious blue eyes piercing. “Yeah?” 

“Yeah.” Keith can feel his heart beating in his throat, swallows it down. “I mean, why not? You practically already have anyway.” 

Lance is quiet for a moment, and Keith holds his gaze while he thinks it over. And then, “Yeah, alright,” he says, and nods, and smiles. “Why not?” 

So, Lance officially moves in.  _ Why not _ ?

Sometimes, Keith thinks he really must be a masochist. 

It’s a few days after that conversation that Lance is hanging all of his formalwear in the closet, along with the miscellaneous other clothing items he’s acquired over their time in space that he insists can’t just go into a drawer. Keith is scrolling through Allura’s latest planetary briefing when Lance goes, “Hey, Keith?” 

“Yeah?” Keith glances over to see Lance looking down at something with a peculiar expression on his face, brows furrowed. Keith follows his gaze. 

“Oh. Yeah.” He sighs, setting the holopad to the side and sitting up. “I know I should probably throw it out. I mean, it’s not like I can ever wear it again. But . . .” 

“I thought you  _ had  _ thrown it out,” Lance says. There’s this odd quality to his voice, something that Keith can’t quite place. He continues to stare for another moment, and then he steps out of the closet and presses the door to slide it shut. Neither of them mentions Keith’s jacket again, after that. 

Until a few days later, when they come back from training ready to take their pre-dinner nap, and Keith finds his old, tattered-beyond-repair jacket is laid out on the bed, looking good as new. 

“What . . . ?” Keith glances behind him to see Lance leaning against the doorframe, watching his reaction. There’s a small smile curving up the corners of his mouth. 

“If you’d  _ told  _ me that you still had the jacket, I could have fixed it ages ago,” he tells him, matter-of-fact. “The Altean sewing equipment here is like, next level technology. All I had to do was replicate the fabric with a sample swatch, stitch it up, and  _ voila _ , your eighties fashion disaster biker jacket is good as new.” 

“I—” Keith doesn’t know what to say. There’s a part of him that is really, completely speechless at the sight of his old jacket, no longer an article of shredded leather and patches of acid erosion but  _ whole _ , without a single thread out of place. And there’s a part of him that feels incredibly stupid, because he  _ hadn’t  _ known Lance could do that, hadn’t even thought to wonder if there was some way to fix it.  _ All of the problems we’ve had to deal with since this jacket was ruined, and it could have been solved from the very beginning _ , that part of him is thinking.

Mostly, though, he just feels this rising, swelling feeling of affection, of gratitude, of  _ love  _ for Lance: this boy who has stuck by him through so much shit recently, who is probably one of the best friends Keith will ever have, who doesn’t even  _ know  _ the way he affects him. All of the best things he feels for Lance are stirring up like sand from the bottom of a lakebed, swirling into something powerful and strong and inescapable. 

In the moment, it’s only logical to take those three steps back to the doorway, to Lance, and pull him in to kiss him. It’s the only thing he can think to do, the only thing he  _ wants  _ to do, and so he does: a little off-center, a lot fueled by nerves, but it’s soft, and Keith presses every ounce of feeling in his body into it. For a long, single moment, it’s just Lance’s lips against his, frozen. And then Keith brings himself back to reality,  _ realizes _ , and freezes himself. 

“Oh, shit, sorry—” he tries to begin, feeling mortification wash over him as his mind immediately begins traveling to the world of worst-case scenarios, and he thinks:  _ this is it, I definitely ruined it this time, Lance is never going to want to even  _ look  _ at me again after this _ —

But when he tries to pull away, Lance’s arm slides around his waist, cementing him there. This close, his eyes are the deep blue of the ocean at twilight, and even though there’s something serious to them, he’s smiling when he says, “If you ever apologize for kissing me again, I’m honestly going to be insulted.” 

“Um.” Before Keith can come up with an adequate response, though, Lance reels him in to kiss him back. It’s sort of how Keith has always imagined kissing Lance would be like—because he’s always thought that Lance would kiss in the same way that he does everything else: with precision, with care, with steady, undeniable focus—but because it’s Lance, he has to go above and beyond expectations. 

Lance is soft in the way he curls his hands, one at his lower back, the other around the back of his neck. But there’s something a little reckless in the way he kisses, something that says he knows what he’s doing, but it doesn’t matter if it’s quite right because just being here, with him,  _ is _ . There’s something joyfully warm, the way he’s somehow able to smile into it without ruining it, the way he tilts Keith’s mouth open and laughs into it.  _ This should be gross _ , Keith can’t help but think, but he’s distracted by the taste of sort-of-cucumber lip balm and  _ Lance _ , and logic is a thing left in the past, somewhere far behind them both. 

“I’ve wanted this for a long time,” Lance confesses when he pulls away, just enough so that the words don’t hit Keith right in the face. He’s looking at him with an intensity in his eyes that dares to be challenged, just so that he can prove himself right. “An  _ embarrassingly  _ long time, Keith.” 

And Keith can’t help but laugh, because this whole time, they’ve both been so unbelievably  _ stupid _ . “Me too,” he says, “Yes.  _ Lance _ —we’re so stupid.” 

And they just stand there, in the still-open doorway of his room,  _ their  _ room, wrapped in each other’s arms and cracking up, probably loud enough that the entire castle can hear them losing their minds. But Keith doesn’t care; he’s high on euphoria, happier than he can remember feeling in a long time, and warmer than if he was standing directly in the light of the sun. 

  
  


_____

  
  


It’s a normal morning the next day when he wakes up, glances to the side to see Lance with his face buried in his pillow. It’s kind of stupid how endeared Keith feels looking at him, especially because enough of his face is visible for him to make out the faint line of drool pooling at the corner of his mouth. He’s smiling when he gets up to go into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him to get ready for the day. 

And then he glances up, catches sight of his face in the mirror, and screams. It’s loud enough to wake Lance up; he’s on the other side of the door within moments, worriedly knocking. “Keith? Keith, tell me you didn’t fall in the shower and die.” 

When Keith presses the door to let him in, expression grave, Lance’s own concerned expression melts into confusion. “What the . . . ?” 

“ _ Why? _ ” Keith asks, feeling as if a combined ton of frustrated and infuriated bricks is slamming into him. “ _ Why  _ do things keep  _ happening _ ?” 

Lance is speechless, and Keith turns with a huff to look into the mirror again, hoping that maybe,  _ maybe  _ his and Lance’s eyes are both playing tricks on them. Hoping that maybe he’ll look again and  _ won’t  _ see the glowing, purple marks curling up his cheeks from his jawline. 

He looks again. They’re still there. 

He’s so frustrated that he could cry. He was  _ finally  _ beginning to forget that there’s something legitimately wrong with him. He was beginning to believe that maybe this was something he could live with. 

What is he supposed to do with this? What the hell  _ is  _ this? 

“Keith,” Lance finally says, a cautious note to his voice that immediately clues Keith in that he’s not going to like whatever he’s about to tell him. “Keith, I think we  _ have  _ to tell someone about this.” 

Keith hates it. He  _ hates  _ that Lance is right. 

He glares at his reflection, at the two undeniable,  _ impossible- _ to-ignore lines on his face. When he reaches up to touch them, they feel just like his skin. He’s not going to be able to hide these. 

So, “Alright,” he relents, and watches his own reflection slump in defeat. Watches until Lance reaches to pull him in, an embrace meant to comfort, one of his silent,  _ hey, it’s going to be alright  _ hugs. 

Keith wants so badly to believe that for a moment, he lets himself. But he’s unable to get that feeling back when they’re standing in front of all of their friends on the bridge, head lowered as Lance recounts the whole ridiculous story for them to hear. 

In the end, there are a lot of stunned faces. And Shiro’s hurt one, the amount of it in his eyes unbearable to look at when he says, “Keith, how could you not tell me?” 

Lance could answer that for him, but when Keith glances over at him, he just pointedly nods his head.  _ Tell him _ . 

Keith doesn’t want to. He looks down at his hands, splayed out almost as if in surrender in front of him, as he admits, “I just—I didn’t want to be a  _ burden  _ on anyone. You’ve always done so much for me, it’s not fair that you always have to deal with everything. I should’ve—I  _ should be able  _ to handle this myself. I didn’t want to hurt you. I’m . . . I’m sorry, Shiro.” 

He doesn’t look up, but he hears the soft sigh his brother releases. Tenses up, as if waiting to be hit with the full weight of his disappointment. But instead of saying anything that could even be considered disappointed, his brother just crosses the floor to pull him into his arms. 

“You don’t understand how much I love you,” Shiro tells him, a sort of sad tinge to his words, but firm when he adds, “You could  _ never  _ be a burden, Keith. You don’t have to be afraid to tell me when something isn’t okay. It’s why I’m  _ here _ .” 

“Yeah, us too,” Hunk speaks up, and Keith looks over Shiro’s shoulder to find that the yellow paladin looks to be on the verge of tears. “We’re your  _ friends _ , Keith. We care about you  _ so much _ , man.” 

“Hunk and Shiro are right.” Allura nods, looking upset herself, though she straightens up to meet Keith’s eyes and say, “We  _ will  _ figure this out, Keith. I’ll schedule a video-conference with Kolivan immediately, and we will get to the bottom of this.” 

Despite everything, Keith finds the strength within himself to smile. It doesn’t cancel out the anxiety completely—after all, there  _ is  _ still something wrong; the evidence is  _ literally  _ written on his face—but he  _ does  _ feel better, now that everyone knows. He doesn’t want to admit Lance was right—because it means that Keith was a victim of his own stupidity yet again—but maybe, this time, he was. 

He meets his boyfriend’s gaze to find him already smiling back at him, and for a moment, he believes that everything really is going to work out. 

That belief lasts all the way up until the instant that Kolivan answers their call later that evening. 

They’re all gathered on the bridge again, waiting anxiously for Kolivan’s comments on Keith’s face. He thinks they’ve probably all jumping to some pretty extreme conclusions, now that they’ve had time to think it over: Pidge suggested it’s some weird form of space chickenpox. Hunk took space chickenpox and jumped immediately to space skin cancer. 

Lance thinks it’s something to do with the touch starvation thing, and Keith is most inclined to believe that theory. It would make sense, considering this  _ all  _ links back to that. 

For a very long, tense moment, there is silence as Kolivan stares at them. Everyone blinks back at them. And then he prompts, “Yes? I am assuming there was an . . . urgent reason for this meeting.” 

“Well, yes,” Allura says, audibly taken aback as she cuts her gaze between the Galra and Keith. “There has been some kind of—development, with Keith, as you can see.” 

“Ah.” Kolivan’s expression does not change as he shifts his gaze over to Keith; however, when he speaks, Keith thinks he almost sounds as bemused as they all are. “So I suppose . . . congratulations are in order?” 

“Um,” Keith says. Hunk makes a noise of affront. “ _ Congratulations?  _ Kolivan, Keith is  _ sick _ .  _ How  _ is that the kind of thing you congratulate?” 

“Oh. I see.” The Marmora leader’s tone does not change, but he appears to have had some kind of revelation. He lifts an eyebrow as he looks at Keith. “I suppose you have not done much studying on the Galra side of your heritage, Red Paladin.” 

Keith shifts uncomfortably on his feet. Feeling a sudden anxiety that he can’t really explain, he glances to his side to find Lance. “Well—not exactly, no. But when it first started happening, Lance helped me look into what it was. We know it’s probably somehow related to . . . to pack-longing. But the symptoms kept getting worse instead of better, and then I woke up with  _ this  _ on my face.” He gestures for emphasis. 

“Right,” Kolivan says. There’s a certain, distinct emotion in his voice that Keith could almost swear is amusement. “Tell me, when did you first notice your . . . symptoms?” 

Keith squints at him, feeling put-off by his persistence to be frustratingly cryptic, but tells him anyway. “After my jacket got ruined. Lance gave me his.” 

“As I thought.” Kolivan inclines his head, as if everything makes sense now. Keith still feels that anxiety churning in his stomach, like the Galra is about to tell him something that he definitely does not want to hear. “Yellow Paladin, your friend is not sick. He has simply bonded. Younger than most Galra, it’s true—though it is not uncommon for those who have experienced pack longing to bond more quickly than others. So again, I offer my congratulations. Is that all?” 

“Wait,” Pidge speaks up, a small furrow forming between her brows as she asks, “What does  _ bonded  _ mean?” 

Kolivan pauses for just a moment, but it’s still long enough for Keith to gather that being  _ bonded  _ isn’t as simple as the Marmora leader initially said. “It is . . . I do not know how it would translate into human terms. It is the private ceremony that signifies that a Galra pairing’s courtship has been successful and they have become permanently joined. Typically, during the first few movements of the union, each individual in the relationship receives facial markings as a physical sign of their new relational status. However, when one partner has no Galra blood, only the one who does will display the markings. As is the case for your red and blue paladins.” 

“Wait.” This time, it’s Keith who says it. The churning nerves in his stomach coalesce, suddenly, into a frozen block of dread. “Wait, you’re not saying we’re—” He can’t make himself say it. 

Lance does, voice a curious sort of quiet. “Married?” 

_ Married.  _

_ Oh. Oh, no _ . 

“I suppose, if that is what you call it.” Kolivan isn’t the type to shrug, but Keith feels that if he was, he would be shrugging in this moment. 

Keith feels like he’s going to throw up. 

“You’re telling me that—that I  _ accidentally  _ made Lance  _ marry  _ me?” 

Kolivan frowns. “There is nothing accidental about it, Red Paladin. If the two of you have formed a bond, it is because you chose, consciously or not, to do so. You do not simply, say,  _ fall into  _ a bond.” 

_ There is nothing accidental about it. You chose to do so.  _

Keith is really going to be sick. He needs to get out of this room. 

He isn’t really aware of his feet leading him from the bridge, but that’s what they do. Not that he makes it far; he only makes it to the corner before his knees give out and he sinks to the ground. His head is spinning. 

He keeps turning the words  _ bond  _ and  _ marriage  _ and  _ accident  _ over and over in his mind. And he replays every moment of his time with Lance since this whole thing started, thinking back on every smile and look and touch with a new perspective, and it makes him feel sick because of how  _ obvious  _ it should have been, how obvious it  _ would  _ have been if he’d just taken the time to look more into his condition besides a few basic google searches. 

He’s so tired of his brain taking him to this place, but he thinks that Lance is probably definitely upset with him now. Taking up his space and his time as a friend is one thing. Unconsciously  _ marrying  _ him the night they become  _ boyfriends _ —if they’ve even reached that stage yet—is another. It’s too far. He thinks that he has to apologize. 

_ Maybe we can get it annulled,  _ he thinks.  _ Like, think really hard about how unready we are for such a big commitment, and my freaky wedding tattoos will disappear. And we can forget this happened.  _ Something tells him that it won’t be that easy. Something in him is terrified that this is permanent. 

How is he supposed to look Lance in the eyes ever again after this? How are they  _ possibly  _ going to fix this? 

“Oh, good. I was worried I was going to have to turn the castle upside down to find you.”  _ Lance _ . Keith’s heart seizes in sudden, overwhelming panic.  _ Oh no. Oh no. Oh no— _

He can feel the air beside him shift as Lance sits down, bending his knees near his chest so he can rest his elbows on them. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything, and Keith feels like his heart is going to beat out of his chest and into the wall opposite them. 

And then: “So, I’m pretty sure when we get home, my family’s not gonna be happy about this.” 

Keith tries to swallow around the eratic stampede of his pulse, tries to begin, “I’m sor—” 

“So we’re going to have to have a real wedding. Like, the ceremony and the reception and the cake—y’know, the works. I was thinking fall would be the best time.” 

And at once, Keith’s heart stops dead. He croaks out, “What?” 

Lance goes on, as if this is the kind of conversation they have all the time. “Think about it. Winter is no good, because that’s when the seasonal depression hits me hard. And spring is allergy season, which is, hmm,  _ no bueno,  _ because can you imagine having our vows interrupted every five seconds for someone to sneeze? And I want it to be outdoors, so that’s a no. Again for summer, because humidity does  _ not  _ do my hair any favors. But fall . . . fall is good. Plus, it’s kind of what started all of this. That fall planet with the acid rain. Kind of romantic, right?” 

Again, Keith says, “What.” 

Lance gives him this look. It’s part exasperation, but mostly just this soft sort of fondness. “Keith, I know what you’re probably thinking. You’re probably feeling all mad at yourself, like you’ve tied me down or something—” 

“I  _ have _ —” Keith argues, but Lance just talks over him. 

“ _ But,  _ let’s face the facts, Keith. We’ve been in love with each other for how long now? Probably longer than either of us have even been aware of. Long enough that some dormant soul-bond connection inside of you  _ woke up  _ to tell you that we have something good and real going on. And yeah, I have to admit, it’s  _ definitely  _ not the ‘courting process’ that I ever imagined. I imagined more flowers and movie dates than giving you a weird Galra rash. But, you know, everyone’s love story is different. It’ll be fun to tell at parties.” 

Keith is silent for a moment, literally unable to process what Lance is getting at. “ _ How  _ can you be so okay with this?” he finally demands. 

“We’ve lived in space for years fighting an evil empire by flying around in magic robot cats,” Lance says without inflection. Keith thinks he can see the corners of his lips twitching with a held-back smile and again wants to ask  _ how _ . “Keith, I already figured  _ something  _ would go weird eventually because of, you know, you being half-alien. But . . . don’t you think this is kind of cool? Turns out we fixed your touch starvation. And got mind-married along the way. Kolivan said, after you left, that it’s something that only happens when both partners are really  _ sure _ . And even if we didn’t think it in our minds, something in our hearts just  _ knew _ . We’re like, chosen soulmates, Keith. We could have a Hallmark movie.” 

Keith ponders that, the idea that maybe Lance isn’t completely off base. That maybe their hearts could have gotten something right before their heads got with the program. That maybe this whole time, they’ve been making their way towards this. That maybe they can make it work. 

“So . . . you definitely don’t want an annulment?” 

Lance laughs, reaches between them to pick up Keith’s hand from the floor. “No, Keith. I absolutely do not want an annulment.” 

“Oh.” Keith’s poor heart, which he feels has been jerked around far too much in recent days, finally kicks back up again.  _ It’s not done yet _ . “Okay.” 

And then Lance’s hand leaves his, and he feels it a moment later on his face, tilting his head to face him. He looks into his eyes, into deep ocean blue, and murmurs, “You wanna know what else I’ve decided for our wedding?” 

Keith can’t look away. Can’t even blink. “What?” he wonders. 

Lance’s mouth curls up into this perfect, sky-splitting smile, and as he brushes a thumb across Keith’s cheek he says, “That you’re going to look frickin’ fan- _ tas _ -tic in purple.” 

And then he leans in to kiss him. And every argument, every worry Keith had? He forgets about every single one of them. 

  
  


_____

  
  


So it turns out that, in the beginning, they weren’t completely  _ wrong _ . 

Keith definitely had some touch starvation going on. Honestly, it had probably been going on for a little while before he started presenting the physical symptoms. Losing his dad’s jacket, they speculate, might have just acted as a kind of catalyst. And it turns out that Lance giving him his, as a gift, was the first action in what Galra consider to be the ‘natural courting process.’ 

Which, along with Keith’s already dormant sense of pack-longing, just made the whole process a  _ lot  _ more intense to experience. 

In hindsight, Keith can admit there was probably a lot that they could have done to prevent it from building up the way it had. If, like Lance had suggested, they had  _ told  _ everyone from the beginning, then maybe things wouldn’t have escalated in quite the dramatic way they had. But it’s too late for that now, and while Keith feels a little—or maybe a  _ lot _ —dumb, he doesn’t think he would have changed it. Because however things happened, they ended up turning out okay.  _ Good _ , even. Better than he could have hoped for. 

Everyone else accepted things pretty quickly, all things considered. They’re all just relieved that Keith didn’t end up actually having some rare incurable disease. Though when everything was all over, Shiro had insisted they have a long conversation about self-worth and his place on the team. It hadn’t been a particularly easy conversation, or one that he wanted to have, but he thinks in the end that Shiro was probably right to push for it. Keith supposes he has some underlying insecurities that he needs to work through. Shiro tells him they all do. 

And then there’s Lance. Lance, one of his best friends, his boyfriend, the love of his life, his . . . husband, at least in Galra terms. Lance is torn between thinking their relationship is the epitome of all romances and thinking it’s absolutely comical. 

“Only  _ we  _ could date for several months and then get married without even knowing it,” he says, and Keith hates to admit that he’s right. He won’t let it go. Because he’s Lance, Keith thinks that he probably never will. 

He’s in for a lifetime of this, he thinks. And it’s funny, because even though the idea of a lifetime of Lance’s terrible jokes and puns  _ shouldn’t  _ sound like the best possible one, it is. Keith has only recently begun to think about what a  _ lifetime  _ with Lance even means, and even though it’s a little scary, mostly all he feels is this rush of affection and anticipation. He kind of can’t wait to see where life takes them next (though he hopes, for both of their sakes, that it won’t be nearly as dramatic). 

He’s on the observation deck one night, thinking again about how strange it is that, in the end, it really  _ doesn’t  _ feel all that strange, the concept that he and Lance are married. Lance says it’s probably because they did everything backwards. Keith thinks, again, that he’s probably right. Lance has proven to be right about a lot of things. 

He hears from behind him, a voice in the doorway, “Hey.” 

And he smiles. Tilts his head back to look up as Lance comes to join him on the floor. “Hey.” 

“I was looking for this.” Lance pinches the fabric of Keith’s—Lance’s—jacket sleeve between his fingertips. “What’s the point of me fixing your jacket if you’re just going to keep stealing mine?” 

“I like your jacket,” Keith defends, wrapping it around his bent knees like a cloak. “It’s warm. It smells like you.” 

“Well, maybe  _ I  _ also like to be warm and smell like me.” 

Keith shrugs. “Guess you’ll just have to steal it back.” 

“Hmm.  _ Or _ , I could just steal you.” Lance snakes his arm around Keith’s shoulders, reeling him into his side. Keith goes willingly, his head finding its place in the juncture of Lance’s neck and shoulder. He remembers the last time they had sat on the observation deck like this, the first time they had been this close. It’s almost impossible to wrap his head around how far they’ve come since then. 

Lance hums again, sounding as if he’s deep in thought about something. Keith feels his fingertips brush lightly against his jaw, right where the Galra marks had ended when they were still on display. “I miss those,” Lance says, “Maybe we should get like, real face tattoos.” 

Keith snorts. “Absolutely not.” 

“Think about it, Keith. Our love could be on permanent display for everyone to see. I bet if we asked Allura, she’d know where we can find a tattoo parlor in the middle of space.” 

“Yeah, Lance, that may be one of the worst ideas you’ve ever had.” 

“ _ Hey.  _ Rude.” 

“Oh, sorry. It  _ is  _ the worst idea you’ve ever had.” 

Lance scoffs, making as if he’s going to pull away in offense, but Keith latches onto his shirt to keep him there. For a moment they just sit there, watching the galaxy they’re traveling through drift past outside. 

And then, softly, Lance says, “What about rings?” 

“Rings?” Keith repeats. The word feels foreign in his mouth. 

“Yeah, rings. Like wedding rings I guess, except we’ll obviously have to get second rings when we go back to Earth. Or I guess we could think of them as engagement rings, since we aren’t  _ technically  _ human married yet. I could even like,  _ actually  _ propose. That could be fun.” 

“Oh.” Keith thinks about that. He’s still thinking about it when Lance rushes on, “I mean, I get it if you think it’s a dumb idea, we obviously don’t  _ have  _ to, if you hate the idea—” 

“I don’t hate the idea,” Keith interrupts. He pulls away from Lance so that he can look at him. He’s biting his lip, looking uncharacteristically nervous. “I like the rings. Why wouldn’t I?” 

“I don’t know. I thought maybe . . . maybe it’s not that important to you.” 

Keith looks at him for a long moment. “It’s important to you.” It’s not a question. Lance shrugs, trying to play off his nerves. 

“I mean, yeah, I guess. I just . . . I don’t know, I’ve always sort of thought it was a big deal.” Keith can hear a lot, though, in what Lance doesn’t say. He reaches out to take his hand.

“If it’s a big deal to you, it’s a big deal to me,” he says firmly. “If you want to propose, I’ll even act surprised when you do it.” 

Lance laughs at that, which is what Keith was hoping for. “Will you say yes?” 

“Guess you’ll have to wait and find out.” 

Lance smiles, squeezes his hand where they’re clasped between them. “Hey, Keith?” he says. 

“Yeah?” 

If possible, his smile goes even brighter, and he looks up to meet his gaze with bright blue eyes. “We’re totally going to be great at the marriage thing.” 

And now Keith laughs. Because the thing is, as crazy as it is, he thinks that Lance is definitely right. 

“You know,” he says, laughter still in his voice, in the air all around them. And there’s so much love there, too, in their clasped hands, in the space between them, in the stars swirling past beyond them. He thinks that, however they came to be like this, he doesn’t regret a single detail. “I really think so too.” 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading <3


End file.
